Charlotte Valori is an award-winning opera critic who has led many opera-based tours to Italy. We asked her to tell us where her love of this art form began, why she loves to share it with others and what she is looking forward on this tour.

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.   
 

Alzira (1845) at the Teatro Regio

An early and rarely staged Verdi opera, Alzira is a dramatic story of love and rivalry set against the dramatic backdrop of colonial Peru. It centres around the conflict between Spanish colonists and native Incas expressed through a love triangle between the Inca princess Alzira, her native lover Zamoro and the Spanish governor Gusmano. It offering a fascinating glimpse into Verdi's emerging style as a composer.

Verdi composed Alzira during a period of intense political unrest in Italy, when the Italian peninsula was not a unified country but a collection of states largely under the influence of the Austrian Empire. It illustrates Verdi’s early engagement with themes of oppression, colonial conflict and moral struggle, ideas that would later become central themes in later works. 

What Charlotte Valori says:

"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.

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.  
 

Nabucco (1842) at the Teatro Regio

A stirring drama in four acts, Nabucco tells the story of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II and his conquest of Jerusalem, which leads to the enslavement of the Hebrew people. The opera explores themes of power, faith and freedom, with a fierce struggle for the throne between Nabucco’s ambitious adopted daughter Abigaille and his true daughter, Fenena.

As Nabucco declares himself a god, he is struck down by madness, losing his crown and authority. Through suffering, he finds redemption by turning to the God of the Hebrews, ultimately converting, restoring his rule and freeing the captives.

Nabucco was Verdi’s first major success and the opera that established his reputation, cementing his status as the composer of the people. The opera is best known for the magnificent chorus 'Va, pensiero' (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves), one of the most moving and iconic moments in all opera which became an unofficial anthem of the Italian Risorgimento (social movement), seeking liberation from Austrian, French and Spanish rule, symbolising the longing for freedom and national unity under foreign rule. 

What Charlotte Valori says:

"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."

Marking Verdi's actual birthday, the spectacular Gala Verdiano at the Teatro Regio di Parma is led by Maestro James Conlon, Music Director of the Los Angeles Opera and renowned Verdi expert, who will be conducting the Orchestra Filarmonica, Toscanini and the Coro Del Teatro Regio Di Parma.

The evening is a musical journey through the composer’s various creative periods, opening with excerpts from Il Corsaro (The Corsair), an early – and wildly romantic - opera set on an island in the Aegean Sea and concluding with excerpts from Jérusalem. This work, a revision of Verdi’s earlier opera, I Lombardi for a Parisian audience in 1847, is set during the Crusades in the Middle East and is a prime example of French Grand Opéra.

And in recognition of the festival’s theme ‘Mondi Lontani’ (Distant Worlds), the programme will also feature a performance of the Overture to the opera Il Guarany by one of Verdi’s most famous contemporaries - and close friend - the Brazilian composer, Antônio Carlos Gomes (1836–1896). 

Inaugurated in 1628, Parma's Teatro Farnese was the first modern theatre in the western world. Located inside the imposing Pilotta Palace, it is one of this beautiful, old city's most striking and storied gems. 

The theatre was commissioned by the Duke of Parma, Ranuccio I Farnese as a dazzling venue for shows celebrating ducal weddings and state visits and its painted wood and stucco framework was lavishly decorated with statues, frescoes, gilded medallions and classical capitals. It also featured a pioneering engineering system for mobile stage sets. 

However, as time went on, the theatre gradually fell out of use and by the time Charles Dickens visited Parma in 1844, he found it to be “a grand, old, gloomy theatre, mouldering away" and commented, "if ever ghosts act plays, they act them on this ghostly stage”. Two hundred years later, a World War II bomb delivered the coup de grâce.

Fortunately, in 1953 work began to restore this historic building. The paper statues, columns and painted Serlian arches had all crumbled away but, as the essential structure was faithfully re-built, the underlying fresco decorations which were thought to have been lost forever were discovered beneath a patina of dust and dirt. By 1965, the renovation was complete and the Teatro Farnese finally took its place once more as an integral part of Parma’s cultural heritage.

Today, the Teatro Farnese is a venue for concerts and special productions, including one of the operas of the annual Verdi Festival. It is also part of the Pilotta Museum Complex, home to the National Gallery of Parma, the historic library, Biblioteca Palatina and the Archaeological Museum.