Verdi legge Verdi

On 29 May, as part of the 2025-2026 season of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, the Teatro Nazionale hosts an evocative show featuring Giuseppe Verdi’s most famous operas, from La Traviata to Aida, from Nabucco to Falstaff, presented through the authentic thoughts and words of one of Italy’s greatest composers.

Amidst prose, music and singing, ‘Verdi legge Verdi’ brings to the stage the life of one of the most emblematic figures in the history of music through an engaging theatrical narration that portrays all of his human complexity.

On stage, with an accurate stage make-up, Massimiliano Finazzer Flory, accompanied by Asako Watanabe on the piano and soprano Elisa Maffi, brings to life Giuseppe Verdi, a reserved and generous artist who was distant from honours, retracing the most significant stages of the composer’s private and artistic life: a great musician with a visionary character, and a man of strong ethical principles and profound civic sensitivity.

The narration traces the different periods of his life: his original family, his early experiences with music, his formative years, his time at the Conservatory, his relationships with Wagner and librettists such as Arrigo Boito, and his artistic vision. An authentic and dynamic portrait of Verdi, which also reveals the ‘behind-the-scenes’ stories, the creative tensions, the controversies, the ‘truths’ of operas such as Otello, Macbeth and Falstaff, his bond with nature and his favourite novels, up to the instructions entrusted to his last will.

Photo: Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, ph Yasuko Kageyama-Teatro dell'Opera di Roma 2018