Giuseppe Verdi depicted with a fuchsia jacket and a flashy skirt, worn on a female body, has sparked controversy even on a political level. At the center of the controversy is the image used on the “queer night”, or the ‘masked ball’ for young people on October 20, preview of the Verdi Festival in Parma
A “pretext to stage ‘the theme of gender identity and disguise – commented the Northern League senators Maria Gabriella Saponara and Maurizio Campari announcing a question to the Minister of Cultural Heritage Dario Franceschini -. In the tests open to the Under 30 public, the spectator is invited to “dress in the way that most represents him or that part of himself that generally remains hidden.” A small Pride within the Verdi Festival: an instrumental use for purely ideological purposes that is truly unacceptable. of the initiative, it is not bearable to see Giuseppe Verdi represented in such a way “.
It is “an evening of celebration” replied the director of the Regio theater Anna Maria Meo, of a “homage to Verdi’s modernity, who has always been a man and artist forerunner of the times, nonconformist par excellence, as evidenced by his choices of life and the heavy censorship undergone on an artistic and personal level “. And this “is demonstrated precisely by the story of Ballo in Maschera, which Festival Verdi presents in the first version set in Sweden, at the court of Gustavo III, as originally conceived for the debut in Rome, before the papal censors intervened with heavy changes from which resulted in the transposition of the story in colonial Boston, without any explicit reference to the sovereign’s homosexuality being possible “. “The lively debate aroused and the numerous reactions, in support and against, that the image proposed on the flyer and the invitation to the public have stimulated – he concluded -, demonstrate that even today, more than two centuries after his birth, Giuseppe Verdi he is still able to ignite the discussion with respect to social issues and that his positions are still subject to the same censorship “.