Un ballo in maschera

About the event

Opera by Giuseppe Verdi

King Gustav loves Amelia, the wife of his best friend. When he finds out, he joins a circle of conspirators who have been plotting the monarch's death for some time and kills the king.

Too late, he realizes that his wife has ultimately remained faithful to him ..

"No other tragic Verdi opera has as much lightness, verve and grace, as much esprit as Un ballo in maschera. The (apparent) cheerfulness is a new dimension in Verdi's operas, announced in the first act of Rigoletto. But tragedy, melancholy and closeness to death always resonate and are thus intensified. This juxtaposition and coexistence, the synchronicity of dance and death in the plot and music is what makes the special and unmistakable tinta (musical color) of Un ballo in maschera." (Georg Titscher)

The opera is based on a true story: in 1792, the Swedish King Gustav III was murdered during a masked ball. As in the opera, the assassin was the nobleman Anckarström, who approached the king in disguise. Unlike in the opera, the reason for the murder was not jealousy, but a political background: Anckarström felt that the king had curtailed his traditional rights and sympathized with the French Revolution. Giuseppe Verdi developed one of the central operas of the Italian repertoire very freely from this historical event.

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(Source: wiener-staatsoper.at)