e are all captivated by this new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, which inaugurated this year’s season at La Scala. Starting with the masterful musical direction of Riccardo Chailly, who from the very beginning inundated us with the famous Verdi overtures that we all have in our memories.
He certainly does not need an introduction: he has been the musical director of La Scala since January 2017, and since 2021, he has been reconfirmed as the head of the Orchestra of the prestigious Lucerne Festival.
Verdi’s La Forza del Destino was presented with great success at La Scala on February 27, 1869. And, as I heard some dissenting voices while leaving the foyer the other evening, it seems that, as the chronicles of the time tell us, these voices were also raised this time, albeit peacefully. Dissent expressed over the mixture of tragic and comic elements that not all music lovers fully appreciate even today. Yet, this is something that Verdi enjoys presenting to us, as musicologist Claudio Toscani well explains in his introductory essay to the La Scala libretto.
This mythical composer, beloved worldwide, has always narrated the human reality in its entirety, surpassing the schematics of romantic melodrama. He emphasizes the central idea of the drama, around which the entire opera revolves: that fate, inexorable, conditions the actions of the characters and determines their fate.
The story of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino
The story of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino is drawn from Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino by Ángel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas. This first Spanish romantic drama was performed for the first time at the Teatro del Principe in Madrid in 1835. She, Donna Eleonora (Elena Stikhina), loves him, Don Alvaro (Luciano Ganci), a Peruvian descended from a royal lineage persecuted by the Spanish. He is not loved by his father, the old Marquis of Calatrava (Fabrizio Beggi), and Don Alvaro accidentally kills him in the first act.
She flees, disguises herself as a man, and then becomes a nun; he escapes and enlists, only to become a monk as well. Her brother, Don Carlo di Vargas (Ludovic Tézier), chases them for years to kill them both. In the end, he is severely wounded in a duel by Don Alvaro, and before dying, Don Carlo di Vargas kills his sister Eleonora.
This story immediately appealed to Verdi, especially because it resembled the dramas of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Hugo, which he had already set to music in Macbeth, Luisa Miller, Ernani, and Rigoletto.
The charm of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera
What fascinates in La Forza del Destino, which unfolds over many years and in very distant places between Spain and Italy, is this mixture of genres with moments of immense tragedy followed by comic scenes. It employs both prose and verse, with highly cultured eloquence, including the use of Latin, while at the same time incorporating expressions from the lower vernacular.
These elements were criticized by contemporaneous critics who viewed this work as a younger sister to Rigoletto, a cousin of Macbeth, and a precursor to Otello and Falstaff. However, Forza del Destino has more to offer, specifically an open dramatic structure. Macbeth and Rigoletto mix genres but do not have the complex and varied plot that this opera possesses.
Gallery: ph Brescia e Amisano © Teatro alla Scala
The Influence of Manzoni on Verdi’s La Forza del Destino
There is a novel that undoubtedly influenced Verdi’s work: I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni. It was one of Verdi’s favorite books, despite the vast distance separating his agnostic pessimism from Manzoni’s fervent Catholicism. In this work, characters disappear for entire acts only to reappear thousands of kilometers away, similar to what happens in I Promessi Sposi. Or in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, encapsulating the paradigmatic narrative structure of the great European novel of the 19th century.
This is well highlighted by Emanuele Senici, another eminent musicologist teaching at La Sapienza in Rome, who tells us about this complex yet fascinating Verdi opera. He even rightly hypothesizes how Forza del Destino influenced the most romantic work of 19th-century Europe, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. The beauty of this Verdi opera, besides offering us the ritual intertwining of contrasts and affections among the protagonists, also grants an unusual space to the choral masses, expertly directed by Alberto Marazzi. But, above all, it frees us from the obligation of the so-called pseudo-Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action.
It masterfully utilizes a melodic sequence that is musically more significant than a motto, but less semantically defined, achieving the masterpiece of this famous relentless spiral at the beginning of the Symphony, following six sacred tolls, which will reference the prolepsis of some of the most important melodies in the opera.
The beauty and originality of the Choirs
He tells us that, thanks to Verdi’s extraordinary ability to synthesize, he imparts a fast-paced rhythm to the narrative, making the audience active witnesses of the threads of fate, the invisible force that is the true protagonist of the story. In the first act, it is still a distant threat, evoked by Leonora’s words, “With you, I will bravely challenge the war of cruel fate”.
In the second act, the naive excitement of those who enlist voluntarily takes over. They are young people full of hope who still believe that wars can restore rights. However, they lack the awareness that, as Hannah Arendt emphasized, conflicts actually serve only to redefine powers. In the third act, the veil of illusion has now fallen. We are immersed in the midst of a war that has dragged on for years. Finally, in the fourth act, only the ruins remain: poverty, hunger, anger, and frustration become the tragic epilogue of the war.
Muscato chooses to tell this story through different eras, exploring it from ever-new spatial and temporal perspectives. The narrative begins in the 18th century and extends to the present day, without rigidly adhering to a specific historical accuracy.
The Characters and Settings of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino
From the very beginning, Leo Muscato’s vision has focused on the idea of a rotating movement. A wheel of fate turning in the opposite direction to that in which the characters stubbornly advance through ever-changing landscapes. Over time, these settings, along with the costumes, become increasingly dark, more devastating, and ever more realistic.
The only exceptions are the monks, universal and timeless figures, who remain unchanged in their role and presence. They traverse the centuries as guardians of a spirituality that transcends epochs. In the narrative, two monks emerge, with radically different yet perfectly complementary characteristics. Padre Guardiano (Simon Lim), a spiritual guide capable of providing comfort, peace, and serenity to anyone who approaches.
Melitone (Marco Filippo Romano), his opposite, a lively, straightforward monk who does not hold back from expressing his thoughts. Leonora, at the end of the final act, emerges from her destroyed refuge and lets out a choked cry, a desperate plea addressed to God and the entire world: “Peace, peace, my God!”. A plea that today, more than ever, as Leo Muscato rightly reminds us, resonates like a universal echo capable of transcending time and deeply touching anyone who listens. And we all share it. Moved by the beauty of this fantastic Verdi opera that has successfully inaugurated the temple of Milanese lyricism.
