The Sicilian Vespers review plot and theatrical panache collide in Verdi's Parisian reinvention

"The Giuseppe Verdi of 1855 was not unlike the Bob Dylan of 1965. Both had just produced, in rapid succession, three defining masterpieces which would ensure their immortality in Verdi's case Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata, in Dylan's the trilogy of albums starting with Bringing It All Back Home. The question that now loomed was where to go from here? For Verdi, as for Rossini and Donizetti before him, the answer was Paris, and the conquest (and financial rewards) of French opera."

"It is a work of uncommon musical fascination, in which Verdi subjects his art to a form of self-renewal in something of the manner that Dylan would also do more than a century later. The score, much admired by Berlioz, is full of new forms of declamation and controlled grandeur. But it has never held a position in the repertoire to compare with its predecessors."

"Stefan Herheim's Covent Garden production of Sicilian Vespers in 2013, now revived by Dan Dooner, was the Royal Opera's very first. Herheim's treatment has lashings of his characteristically bold theatrical panache. He sets it, not in 13th century Sicily as Verdi prescribed, but in the Paris opera's Le Peletier theatre at the time of the work's premiere. Ballerinas, boulevardiers and Balzacien low-lifes abound. All this is superimposed on the opera's original plot in ways that can be hard to follow."

Giuseppe Verdi in 1855 had produced three major operas. He turned to Parisian grand opera and composed The Sicilian Vespers, a French work with ballet about the 1282 Sicilian rising against French invaders. The score introduces new declamatory forms and controlled grandeur, admired by Berlioz, though it never matched the repertoire status of those earlier works. Stefan Herheim's 2013 Covent Garden production, revived by Dan Dooner, relocates the action to the Paris Opéra's Le Peletier; the stage features ballerinas, boulevardiers and Balzacian low-lifes. Herheim's overlays complicate the original plot and leave ambiguities. Speranza Scappucci makes an impressive debut as the Royal Opera's principal guest conductor.

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