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The full calendar of the last season before the grand return to the historic venue: Opera, Concerts, Dance and Academy.

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The 2027 season of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna marks its return to the historic home in Piazza Verdi after restoration.

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Teatro Comunale di Bologna

Opera

Dido and Æneas, Die Sieben Todsünden

, , March 2024

Dido and Æneas, Die Sieben Todsünden

The opera

Opera Season 2024

Composer
Henry Purcell; Kurt Weill

Conductor and director

Characters and cast

  • Didone, regina di Cartagine Danielle de Niese
  • Enea principe troiano Francesco Salvadori
  • Belinda Mariam Battistelli
  • Seconda donna Patricia Daniela Fodor
  • La maga Bruno Taddia
  • Prima strega Marco Miglietta
  • Seconda strega / Marinaio Andrea Giovannini
  • Spirito Paola Valentina Molinari
  • Anna I Danielle de Niese
  • Anna II Irene Ferrara
  • La famiglia Marco Miglietta
  • La famiglia Andrea Giovannini
  • La famiglia Nicolò Ceriani
  • La famiglia Andrea Concetti

Orchestra and chorus

  • Orchestra Orchestra
  • Chorus Coro
  • Chorus master Gea Garatti Ansini

Creative team

Costumes
Giada Masi
Scene e luci
Angelo Linzalata

Details

Production
Nuova produzione del Teatro Comunale di Bologna con Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia e Fondazione Haydn di Bolzano e Trento
Information

The «pious Aeneas», as Virgil calls him, is certainly not merciful: Latin pietas is a sense of duty that often demands the smothering of feeling and compassion. In Purcell’s opera it is not even fate or divine intervention that drives the self-denial of the Trojan exile, a refugee in Carthage, a city built by other fugitives. It is not the real Mercury who orders him to leave, but an evil spirit in the perverse machination of witches and supernatural creatures envious of human happiness. Myth becomes fairy tale, the divine becomes the fantastic. The human, prey to treacherous and deceiving forces, is left lonelier and more deluded still.

Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere is a 2000 essay by Ute Ehrhardt. The Marquis de Sade knew it well when he celebrated the misfortunes of virtue and the prosperity of vice; and, less extreme, Defoe with his unscrupulous Moll Flanders.

On this initiatory path of moral reversal, Anna splits into two sisters, passion and reason, the body of a dancer and the voice of a singer, the goods and the trader. She sells herself and rids herself of unforgivable sins such as disinterested love (lust), modesty (pride), outrage at injustice (anger) and a healthy appetite (gluttony). All under the watchful eye of a grotesque family made up of male voices alone, waiting for the longed-for little house in Louisiana. Material goods win over the spirit: it is the gospel of a petty bourgeoisie that sells its soul for money in 1933, when Brecht and Weill, exiles in Paris, told the story of Europe’s crisis — strikingly current — in their last collaboration.

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Opera

Semele

23, 25 October 2026

Teatro Auditorium Manzoni

Semele
Conductor
Giulio Prandi
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Opera

Samson et Dalila

13, 15 November 2026

Teatro Auditorium Manzoni

Samson et Dalila
Conductor
Roberto Abbado
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Opera

La straniera

22, 24 January 2027

La straniera
Conductor
Fabrizio Maria Carminati
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