For this triennium, the Macerata Opera Festival has based its artistic programme on a project dedicated to the city/polis and the community/territory, associating a colour and an emotion with each season of the period 2018-2020.
With #verdesperanza, the 2018 Festival focused on the relationship between cities, the world and nature, in light of the seismic earthquake swarm that struck Macerata and central Italy in 2016. The theme included the fragility of human beings in the face of cataclysms as well as their joint responsibility for impacting on natural elements, often negatively. This presented the opportunity to discuss physical and moral reconstruction, nature, natural phenomena, sustainability, ecology, and the concept of green, even in the broadest sense of youth, growth, and regeneration.
With #rossodesiderio, in 2019, the Festival continued to investigate human emotions through the colours of our world, highlighting the materiality linked to bodies, physique, structures, and passionate feelings, which can even become violent. However, violence is always defeated by positive and vital elements: energy, warmth, vitality, and love.
This three-year period ends in 2020 with #biancocoraggio and three main opera titles, Tosca, Don Giovanni and Il trovatore. These titles will evoke and explore in depth three main themes: emancipation, enlightenment, and fate. Moreover – according to the Superintendent Luciano Messi, the Artistic Director Barbara Minghetti, and the Music Director Francesco Lanzillotta – these operas will present, through the richness of their librettos and the strength of their characters, three different epiphanies of “courage”: loyal, mocking, and valiant. Tosca will be very “pictorial”, Don Giovanni will have a timeless cinematographic setting, and Il trovatore will be a fiery show.
The projects for the Macerata Opera 4.0 competition are therefore required to develop this theme artistically in a creative and contemporary way.
