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Don Carlos at The Metropolitan Opera

In Don Carlos, his grand drama of Inquisition-era Spain, Verdi wages a war of ideas, pitting his own humanist ideals against an unholy union of church and state. This season, the Met rallies its troops for a new production of this innovative and complex masterpiece, presented for the first time in company history in the original five-act French version. Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads an unbeatable cast in a staging by David McVicar that taps into the darkness and despair of a people suffocated by tyranny, as well as the poignancy of their hopeless yet heroic struggle for freedom.

A work of towering ambition and sprawling scope, Verdi’s Don Carlos is many things at once: a political drama, an ideological manifesto, a grand spectacle, an intimate story of thwarted love, a chronicle of familial strife, a meditation on death and the nature of the afterlife, and more besides. For any opera company hoping to successfully bring it to the stage, it presents similarly multifaceted challenges, not only with its monumental production demands, but also thanks to its requirement for no fewer than six premier singers and the need to sort through a complex catalog of versions and revisions...READ MORE

Author: Jay Goodwin

TAGS: DON CARLOS

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