“In Parma, we would have spared a poster by Giuseppe Verdi transgender, depicted with female breasts and clothing, but today everything is bent to the new LGBT ideological conformism that is to be imposed on the whole country. Culture and tradition are also exploited. to make it propaganda “.
The Parma senators of the Lega argue, Maria Gabriella Saponara and Maurizio Campari, about the Verdi Festival in Parma and the opera Un Ballo in Maschera, staged under the direction of Jacopo Spirei, from the project by Graham Vick, which has become “the pretext for staging the theme of gender identity and disguise. ‘In rehearsals 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 truly unacceptable “.
“Without wishing to enter into the merits of the initiative – conclude Saponara and Campari -, it is not bearable to see Giuseppe Verdi represented in such a way, a strongly offensive image for the Maestro, devoid of respect and decorum”, argue Saponara and Campari who have a question was addressed to the Minister for Culture “to find out what initiatives he intends to take to stop this improper use of the image of Maestro Verdi”.
Verdi Off: the Maestro in the drawings by Davide Forleo – photo
Everything is ready for the sixth edition of Verdi Off from 18 September to 17 October 2021. Many appointments in Parma and in the province to return to share the joy of the discovery and rediscovery of Giuseppe Verdi and his works from different and surprising perspectives. The program
In relation to the parliamentary interpellation presented by the Parma senators, Anna Maria Meo, general director of the Teatro Regio di Parma and artistic director of the Verdi Festival, replies that “Queer night wants to pay homage to the modernity of Verdi, 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 “.
“As demonstrated 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 derived the transposition of the story in colonial Boston, without any explicit reference to the sovereign’s homosexuality “, says Meo.
“This ‘incident’, not the only one in the troubled history of Verdi’s relations with censorship, religious and political, inspired Queer Night, a communicative event promoted as part of Verdi Off, the review of the Verdi Festival which among its also aims to broaden the boundaries of the festival and involve younger communities who attend opera less. The lively debate aroused and the numerous reactions, in support and against, that the image proposed on the flyer and the invitation they stimulated the public, they show that even today, more than two centuries after his birth, Giuseppe Verdi is still able to ignite the discussion on social issues and that his positions are still subject to the same censorship “.
The mayor and president of the Teatro Regio Foundation, Federico Pizzarotti, speaks of “the usual delusions of the League”. “The great parliamentary questions of the League in the pandemic period, even asking the minister. The ‘grave’ fault is to represent art in its various facets, even more modern and nonconformist” and pushes the theater and the director Meo to “go on with courage and freedom. The League and its senators, once again, have shown that they do not know the meaning of freedom and the beauty, without cages, of art “.
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