The Teatro Real closes the season with the fire and revenge of ‘Il Trovatore’ and the applause of the public

The Teatro Real closed its 2025-2026 season tonight with the premiere of ‘Il Trovatore’, by Giuseppe Verdi, and the audience surrendered to the four protagonists and the orchestra under the baton of Nicola Luisotti.

Thus, the success of the Italian composer has returned this Monday to the Madrid coliseum after its staging in 2019 with strong support from the attendees who, however, have shown division of opinion regarding the staging, with ovations but also boos.

The premiere was attended, according to Teatro Real sources, by the third vice president and minister for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Sara Aagesen; the delegate of the Government Area of ​​Culture, Tourism and Sports, Marta Rivera de la Cruz; the president of Europa Press, Asís Martín de Cabiedes; the president of the Court of Accounts, Enriqueta Chicano Jávega; or the Deputy Secretary of Institutional Regeneration of the Popular Party, Cuca Gamarra, among others.

Verdi’s production, with a libretto by Salvatore Cammarano, follows in the footsteps of the drama ‘The Troubadour’ by the poet Antonio García Gutiérrez. The Italian master commissioned an opera that avoided traditional closed operatic numbers such as arias, cabaletas, cavatinas, duets, trios, choruses and that prioritized the continuity and fluidity of the dramaturgical discourse.

The librettist created a montage that incorporates all the formal clichés of the time, although structurally balanced in four acts divided into two scenes of unequal duration.

Thus, in the opera two plot lines intersect: the thirst for revenge of the gypsy Azucena, whose mother and son have died at the stake, and the love triangle in which Leonora is disputed by two enemy suitors, who represent opposing families, classes and ideologies.

The set design was carried out by Francisco Negrín, who in the media presentation defended a reading of the play focused on the characters’ inability to let go of their past.

In fact, the setting is essentially an empty, abstract cube, where the characters live tied to the ghosts of the past and barely manage to reach anything from the present. Fire is the omnipresent metaphor throughout the entire montage: in the pyre, in the camp bonfire, in the spectral appearance of the faces and clothing, and in the evocation of pending revenge.

All the characters in the play are marked by memories, regrets or desires for revenge that condition their decisions, while the fire becomes the great symbolic element of the montage due to its relationship with the trauma that haunts Azucena.

One of the keys to the production has been to make visible on stage the ghosts of the past that constantly appear in the story, with the aim of turning events that, to a large extent, are narrated by the characters into dramatic action.

Both the soprano Marina Rebeka, in her role as Leonora, and the Polish tenor Piotr Beczala, in charge of playing Manrico, a psychologically complex character who has oscillated between lover and warrior, have been highly celebrated by the public.

The music, directed by the honorary musical director of the Teatro Real, Nicola Luisotti, has accompanied and explained all the complexities of the plot, as Verdi wanted.

The artistic director of the Real, Joan Matabosch, explained at the presentation of this production that the choice of ‘Il Trovatore’ to close the season responds to the desire to program titles of great popularity among the public in July. In this sense, he recalled that this opera has had an “enormous” impact since its premiere in 1836.