Five hours of show for the Huguenots by Giacomo Meyerbeer, a colossus little represented in Italy that the La Monnaie theater in Brussels, which has always projected towards the new, the unusual and the little known, has entrusted to the guidance of our Evelino Pidò, a house director in all the main theaters in the world but strangely little present in Italy. Five hours of show in front of a large, attentive and enthusiastic audience: it is the result of the work that the superintendent Peter de Caluwe has been carrying out for almost twenty years, and which allows him to have the theater full for two operas in first performance in every season. absolute and a billboard that, in 2022-23, will include two Strauss, two Tchaikovsky and other titles certainly not of great popular appeal. But this is how the public is educated, leading them to know and love masterpieces mistakenly considered by us to be reserved for an audience of connoisseurs.
So it was for these Huguenots that Pidò conducts with the scruple and attention to detail that has always guided his work and which are all the more necessary here: Meyerbeer’s work offers a river of music chiseled with subtleties and nuances, the correspondent of the prevailing luxury in the period of Louis Philippe who valued the sumptuous appearance with respect to the depth of the contents. So great mass scenes and delightful landscape openings, scenes of prayer and half-dressed bathers, hymns to religious austerity and the pleasure of wine, war and love, and so on. A cauldron musically full of original ideas, from which both Verdi and Wagner drew, placing them at the service of the drama, which here takes a back seat.
Pidò vigorously tightened the screws of this great spectacular machine, assisted by a first-rate orchestra, by singers almost all suitable to face the technical difficulties, including some very difficult ones, and by the direction of Olivier Py, now realistic, now symbolic, but useful in embodying characters not always sufficiently highlighted by the brilliant music of Meyerbeer, an astute demagogue of the highest class.