The baroque opera of high dramaturgical intensity Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell and the twentieth-century ballet with incisive satire Die sieben Todsünden by Kurt Weill on a text by Bertolt Brecht make up the unprecedented diptych proposed in the 2024 Opera Season of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna. The performance, co-produced with Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia and Fondazione Haydn di Bolzano e Trento, will be premiered at the Comunale Nouveau starting on Saturday 16 March at 6.00 p.m. – also broadcast live on Rai Radio3 – with repeats until Thursday 21 March.

The direction is entrusted to Daniele Abbado, who tells how the project juxtaposes two works about cities: ‘the mythological city in Dido, the prophecy about the future of cities in Brecht-Weill. We juxtapose Purcell’s unfinished opera with the opera-ballet of Brecht and Weill fleeing Nazi Germany. […] Dramaturgically, the link lives in the fact that, albeit in very different ways, we are dealing with the relationship between the individual and the social group with which he or she is forced to relate’. In Dido and Aeneas, Abbado finds connections with the present: ‘Witches are equivalent to haters who come out of nowhere inventing slanders and aiming at the destruction of one or more people, in our case Dido’. In the Seven Deadly Sins, compared to Purcell’s Carthage we enter different American metropolises. “We are faced with a reversal of the meaning of the seven vices of the Christian religion,” says Abbado, “which in the case of Brecht-Weill’s re-interpretation are transformed into obstacles to personal enrichment.

Brecht has a very clear idea of the new world where man must somehow become his own capitalist and in order to succeed he must choose to sell what he possesses: body, personality, honour’. Generous, in this title, is the use of costumes, as indicated in the libretto: in fact, we move from the world of cabaret to that of cinema to the circus. The sets and lights of the diptych are by Angelo Linzalata, the costumes by Giada Masi and the choreography by Simona Bucci.

On the podium is the conductor Marco Angius who, speaking of Dido and Aeneas, recalls that it is ‘an opera-enigma, as the original autograph score is still missing. The sources that have handed it down to us are more than a century later. From this condition, which is quite unusual, musically speaking, a case was born, an absent body with an authenticity that has never been revealed and that demands an innovative rather than conservative restoration: thus Dido, emblem of an unattainable past, must be relocated as an artefact, ancient but also current, that stands out against the dark backgrounds of contemporary musical restlessness’. Since the original score of Dido and Aeneas has never come down to us (two versions are known, and both are incomplete), Angius and Abbado decided to look to the world of contemporary music to insert some graft, They found interesting affinities in three of Dido’s choruses written in 1958 by Luigi Nono (a composer whose birth centenary falls this year) on texts by Ungaretti – placed at the beginning of the opera and at the end of the first and second acts – and in the instrumental introduction from Giacinto Scelsi’s Okanagon, a 1968 microtonal trio for harp, tam-tam and double bass, inserted in the opening scene of the sorceress (act 1, 2).

Starring in both titles – respectively in the roles of Dido (a role she is tackling for the first time) and Anna I (which she has just sung in concert with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Edward Gardner and which she will now perform on stage in Bologna) – is the Australian soprano Danielle De Niese, an artist with a strong personality who now lives in the United States, described by the New York Times as “Opera’s Coolest Soprano”, making her debut at the Comunale. The cast of Dido and Aeneas is completed by Francesco Salvadori as Aeneas, Mariam Battistelli as Belinda, Patricia Daniela Fodor as the Second Woman, Bruno Taddia as the Sorceress, Marco Miglietta as the First Witch, Andrea Giovannini as the Second Witch and the Sailor, and Paola Valentina Molinari as the Spirit. Maestro on harpsichord is Nicoletta Mezzini, on the theorbo and baroque guitar is Alberto Mesirca, on cello Roberto Cima and on double bass Gianandrea Pignoni. Die sieben Todsünden also features Irene Ferrara as Anna II and the male voices of Marco Miglietta, Andrea Giovannini, Nicolò Ceriani and Andrea Concetti as The Family. The dancers are Matilde Bignamini, Luca Campanella, Lucia Cinquegrana, Lucas Delfino, Erika Rombaldoni and Danilo Smedile. The Orchestra and Choir – involved in Purcell’s opera and prepared by Gea Garatti Ansini – are those of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna.

The greatest English musician of the Baroque era, in c. 1689. Henry Purcell gave birth to the three-act opera Dido and Aeneas, with a libretto by Nahum Tate based on Tate’s five-act tragedy Brutus of Alba, or The Enchanted Lovers and Virgil’s Aeneid. The story sees the Trojan prince Aeneas as the guest of the Queen of Carthage Dido. Their cursed love, victim of the machinations of an evil spirit and witches, will lead to Aeneas’ departure and Dido’s death.

A German musician naturalised in the United States, in 1933 Kurt Weill performed in Paris the satirical ballet with song consisting of a prologue, seven parts and an epilogue Die sieben Todsünden, created as a clear denunciation of humanity corrupted by capitalism. The production, by George Balanchine and Caspar Neher, marked the last collaboration with Brecht. This is the first time that the Teatro Comunale di Bologna is presenting this opera in stage form.

The performances will be preceded – about 45 minutes before the start – by a short presentation of the opera in the Foyer of the Comunale Nouveau.

Tickets – from 15 to 100 euro – are on sale online through Vivaticket and at the Teatro Comunale ticket office, open Tuesday to Friday from 12 to 6 p.m., on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Largo Respighi, 1); on performance days at the Comunale Nouveau (Piazza della Costituzione, 4) from one hour before and up to 15 minutes after the start.

On stage at the Comunale Nouveau from 16 March at 6 pm – also live on Rai Radio3 – to 21 March