The Parma Verdi Festival with an award-winning opera critic
ECT: What first sparked your love of opera?
CV: I read Classics at Oxford, where I became fascinated by the reception of classical antiquity by later cultures. That’s when I really discovered opera for myself, thanks to its roots as a Renaissance response to Greek tragedy. I have had hours of fun ever since exploring the world of opera, from the earliest works of Monteverdi right up to premieres of modern experimental pieces, first as an audience member and later as a critic. I enjoy opera primarily as a theatrical art form: I’m not a musicologist and I look at pieces more like a dramaturg would where the music is part of the language of opera, the first truly multimedia art form.
ECT: What do you enjoy about leading opera-based tours?
CV: Mainly the other people! It’s always remarkable how a shared specific interest, like opera, brings warmth and cohesion to the group early on. Everyone comes to opera in their own way, and everyone has an interesting story to tell, or observation to share, about the art form. I love talking about opera with people who are new to it, but it’s also wonderful to hear reminiscences from people who have significant experience of this exciting, international art. You always find someone who has been lucky enough to see something you wish you could have seen yourself!
I also love being able to immerse myself for a few days in the world of the composer, not just by seeing the work, but seeing relevant physical locations and museum collections in the same trip. I tend to find that I make new connections with the work, and find new levels of understanding about the composer, faster and better than by simply researching at home, or seeing a few performances over the year. It’s almost like going on retreat: you can focus deeply for a few days and it powerfully enriches your understanding of the whole.
ECT: What are you looking forward to on this tour?
CV: My Italian family are Tuscan (from near Florence), so Puccini is really my “home” composer. I’ve spent a lot of time in Tuscany, but not in Emilia Romagna and this will be my first visit to Parma. I cannot wait to see inside the Teatro Farnese, a remarkable survival of a Renaissance theatre. We have so many Verdi treats ahead, I feel we are rather spoiled for choice, but I might try to have a moment in the Museo Glauco Lombardi if I can, a museum focused on the life of Marie Louise, Napoleon’s second wife and Duchess of Parma. The vaulted ceiling by Correggio in the Camera di San Paolo, a former convent, is also on my wishlist! Being Tuscan, I’m looking forward to trying the cuisine of Emilia Romagna, which will of course be a little bit different; and I can’t help noticing we will be there in white truffle season… Hooray!
The Verdi Festival has been on my opera bucket list for many years. A festival dedicated to a composer gives us a unique opportunity to focus on, and connect with, the work in a very personal way: when that festival takes place in a physical location where the composer actually spent time in real life, this is further heightened. It’s incredibly special to feel you are walking the same streets, gazing at the same landscapes and breathing in the same atmosphere of the place he once did. Just as you understand Puccini rather more deeply after the Festival Pucciniano, I hope this festival will bring us all a little closer to Verdi the man, as well as Verdi the artist. There’s definitely an aspect of operatic pilgrimage to a trip like this. I’m looking forward to finding my own special moment of personal connection with him, somewhere along the way.
ECT: Tell us a bit about the three operas guests on this tour will see
CV: I am extremely lucky to be one of the few people to have been present at the UK premiere of Verdi’s Alzira, at Buxton Opera Festival in 2018, so I have actually seen Alzira once already – something not many people can say! Alzira is a rare and unusual treat, set in the world of Peruvian Incas and Spanish conquistadors: the plot is essentially a doomed love triangle skewed by two complex father-child relationships (a key theme for Verdi). He wrote it inside a single month in the ‘galley years’, when he churned out work at a terrifying rate (and didn’t always enjoy it much, either). Alzira is moving in its own way, but the sheer rarity of performance is what makes it remarkable.
Aida (which celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2021) is, by contrast, one of the most famous of all operas ever written, a Romeo-and-Juliet story set in ancient Egypt, commissioned from Verdi by the Khedive of Egypt, Isma'il Pasha, to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. For what turned out to be a global blockbuster, it famously had a fairly rocky and uncertain gestation: Verdi had to be asked twice to write it. But, as so often happened with him, persistence did pay off: though he was reluctant even to begin working on it, he created something extraordinary which has emphatically stood the test of time. There will be a lot of familiar music, like ‘Celeste Aida’, but it’s the delicate moments of exoticism in the score which will be fun to hear properly in an intimate theatre like Busseto (whereas they are easily lost on a bigger or open air stage).
Nabucco is arguably the opera which created Verdi’s whole career. He refused at first to write it and, indeed, had to be forced to write it. The libretto was thrust upon him (quite literally) after an intense and devastating period of grief in his life, having just lost not only his wife, but both their young children. Wracked with grief, Verdi had vowed never to compose again. The subsequent creation of Nabucco – and of the heartbreaking chorus of the Hebrew slaves, “Va, Pensiero” – is one of the most tragic and vital moments in the history of opera. To see this classic work on Verdi’s true ‘home turf’ will be insanely intense! I can’t wait.
ECT: The theatres themselves are rather special - what will this add?
CV: I think Verdi would be glad to think we were seeing Aida in Italy: he himself refused to go to Cairo, despite generous invitations from his patron and considered the Milan performance the “true premiere”! It will be really interesting to see this famously huge opera, so often performed on a giant scale, in a small, intimate house like the Teatro Giuseppe Verdi in Busseto. It will bring us much closer to the Italian 19th century experience of the piece. Most people would have experienced it in smaller houses.
Teatro Regio has a formidable reputation as an opera house, not least for the openly (and sometimes loudly!) discerning character of its audience, which rather goes against how we tend to behave at opera houses in England… I think we are definitely in for an exciting, engaging opera experience with a difference in Parma. It will be a great privilege to see Verdi staged here.
Discover our holiday to the Parma Verdi Festival 2026 here