Verdi’s La Forza del Destino marks the return of the grand opera to the Porto Ageas Coliseum
The Porto Ageas Coliseum and the San Carlos National Theater (TNSC) come together to present the opera La Forza del Destino, one of Giuseppe Verdi’s most ambitious compositions. Soprano Julianna Di Giacomo and tenor Kristian Benedikt take on the pair Leonora / Alvaro, in a story where intense personal dramas unfold with the war in the background.
Very rarely did Verdi’s music break out as strongly as in this opera of limit situations: the story of Don Alvaro and his reciprocating passion for Donna Leonora, daughter of the Marquis of Calatrava, is sung. When the Marquis refuses to hold his daughter’s hand in marriage, the consequences are dramatic and tragedy takes hold of his destiny.
Verdi and Francesco Maria Piave based La Forza del Destino on the dramatic play by Angel de Saavedra, Don Alvaro, the Fuerzo del Bell. Together they created a remarkable four-act opera, both in history and scenery and in orchestration.
The partnership between the Porto Ageas Coliseum and the only lyric theater in the country thus has an important continuity after the huge success of La traviata in 2018, which sold out in Lisbon and Porto, and “Turandot”, which in 2017 put ending a 33-year absence from the TNSC at the Colosseum.