“Although underestimated today, I Lombardi nevertheless belongs to the youthful but already glorious works of Verdi, who, on the strength of the success of Nabucco, confirmed with this new opera his masterly rise in the field of lyrical art”.

Marie-Aude Roux

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Libretto byTemistocle Solera, based on Tommaso Grossi

Pagano, in love with his brother Arvino’s wife, mistakenly kills his father. He goes into exile in the Holy Land and renounces love. In the guise of a hermit, he helps the Crusaders, led by Arvino, to deliver Antioch, whose tyrant is holding his daughter, then to liberate Jerusalem: victory sounds. The mysterious hermit reveals himself, Pagano confesses his crime and and dies forgiven.

For La Scala in Milan, in 1843, Verdi composed a work about a family drama with hints of love rivalries between two brothers in the context of the First Crusade. The libretto for I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata, written by Temistocle Solera, already the author of Nabucco, includes many patriotic allusions. As part of the Risorgimento and in the wake of the famous “Va pensiero”, which had brought the work both musical and political success, it was impossible to see anything other than a hope of the hypothetical independence and unification of Italy. Verdi became a sort of orator of the people who, thanks to his art, carried the hopes of the revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, who himself several years earlier in his Filosofia della Musica dedicated his artistic advice to this ignoto numini, this young stranger who, perhaps somewhere in the country, is driven on by inspiration and who encloses himself the secret of a musical era… this says it all!

• Most recent performance at the ORW
  To be performed for the first time at the Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège!
• New production
  Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège

With the participation of IMEP and of the Conservatoire Royal de Liège and the Mosa Ballet School.