E lucevan le stelle An evening with Neil Shicoff and Julia Stemberger

The 19th century is regarded as having been the great age of opera, and not without reason. The composer Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975) wrote in his later years of Giuseppe Verdi, »Never before, nor ever since, have the people been so profoundly, so decisively at one with a composer.« At that time in Europe, opera was capable of achieving an effect unparalleled even by film today. »Viva Verdi« for example, became the battle cry of the Italian Risorgimento (Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia), and in 1830 a performance of Daniel-François-Esprit Auber’s opera La muette di Portici inBrussels sparked off the Belgian Revolution. It is the unconditional passion, the charged and uncompromising nature of the music and its characters that has made opera into a »powerhouse of emotion« (Alexander Kluge) that is still operating. These works written more than a hundred years ago still blaze with our longings and fears, our excitement, our sadness and our laughter.
In E lucevan le stelle the painter Cavaradossi sings of the beginnings of his love for the prima donna Floria Tosca. Under the same title, this evening of some of the greatest arias by notable composers from the heyday of opera leads us back to the sources they emerged from – to literature. One of the great tenors of our time, Neil Shicoff, will interpret musical monologues by Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Jules Massenet, Jacques Offenbach and Pyotr Tchaikovsky, each for itself – the performance as a whole being at the same time a close-up of exceptional emotional conditions. Actress Julia Stemberger will be juxtaposing the singing with texts by poets whose writings inevitably led the composers to react with music. And that was the precise moment when the stars began to shine.