Maestro Alberto Veronesi directed tonight with a blindfold lowered over his eyes the controversial Boheme in a production set in ’68, with Mimì in a miniskirt and other references to youth protests. It is the first opera on the bill at the 69th Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago (Lucca). The public challenged him by calling him a ‘buffoon’, calling him a ‘fool’, urging him with “Go away!”.
Many yelled “Shame on you”. But Veronesi continued to conduct the arias from Bohème and then shouted at the spectators: “I don’t want to see these scenes.” Today the undersecretary Vittorio Sgarbi urged him not to direct this Boheme.
Master Veronesi putting on the blindfold, a black fabric, thus wanted to criticize the French director Christophe Gayral who, according to what Sgarbi reiterated today, betrays “every Puccinian vision and spirit” in the sets designed by Christophe Ouvrard, having transposed into a context completely different historical and social context in which the events of Puccini’s work develop.
The Undersecretary for Culture Vittorio Sgarbi already last July 6, at the press conference for the presentation of the program of celebrations for the centenary of the birth of the composer Giacomo Puccini which falls in 2024, promoted by an entity other than the Puccini Festival, contested this new and heretic production of Bohème which opened the 2023 Festival tonight.
The Torre del Lago theater was sold out. Many foreign tourists come just to see the opera. Some spectators didn’t like Alberto Veronesi’s particular form of protest and left early.
On the other hand, the mayor of Viareggio Giorgio Del Ghingaro joked, also to temper spirits: “Maestro Veronesi wanted to demonstrate that he knows the score by heart”.
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