La forza del destino

The Epiphany Festival at the Novaya Opera
January 19 – 30, 2021

The opera La forza del destino was premiered almost 160 years ago, on October 29, 1862 in the Bolshoi (Kamenny) Theatre of Saint Petersburg. It was the only composition Verdi wrote on commission from a Russian theatre. The public found the plot gloomy and the music too complicated, so for the premiere at La Scala (1869) a second edition was made, which was later successfully produced on other world stages.

Hate and love, class inequality and fate are the most important themes in Verdi’s operas. In La forza del destino racial bias is added to these.

Leonora di Vargas, the daughter of the Spanish Marquis of Calatrava, is in love with an “unworthy” young man, Don Alvaro, who is a descendant of an ancient Inca family. Of course, the Marquis is opposed to such an alliance. Having found Alvaro in his daughter’s room, Calatrava showers him with accusations of Leonora’s lost honour. As a result of a fatal accident the Marquis is mortally wounded. As he dies, he curses his daughter. Leonora and Alvaro are parted: she takes the veil and he goes to the army. But Calatrava’s son, Don Carlos, after his father’s death vows to take revenge on his sister and her murderer lover. And fate takes care of the situation…

The founder of the Novaya Opera, Evgeny Kolobov, had a special attraction to Verdi’s opera. In 1979, he was the music director of the production at the Sverdlovsk Opera and Ballet Theatre. In the same year, the production was shown in Moscow and, according eyewitnesses, it was a bombshell.

Kolobov began to be much talked about; he was offered a job at the Mariinsky Theatre where a few years later he produced La forza del destino again.

For the third time Kolobov returned to this composition in 1993.

That year, in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory the opera was performed in concert. And in the year of the 75^th anniversary of Evgeny Kolobov’s birth, the Novaya Opera Theatre that he founded presents a concert performance of Verdi’s famous opera. The performance will be conducted by Evgeny Kolobov’s colleague, friend and classmate in Mark Paverman’s class at the Urals Conservatory, People’s Artist of the Republic of Moldova Alexandru Samoilă.