Tiroler Festspiele - LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR

The opera highlight of the winter season: the staged production of Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. A woman must renounce her great love for family interests and becomes the victim of an arranged marriage. In the end, madness and suicide await; “not again,” one is tempted to say. However: Donizetti's music makes the difference. It dresses all that suffering and madness in such bravura and beauty that in the past, audiences used to ask the singers for a Da Capo because they wanted to hear them die twice in a row. Repeat performances in operatic productions are rare today – although there was one last winter with I puritani in Erl! – but the fascination remains. Hardly any opera offers as many first-class melodic ideas as Lucia di Lammermoor. It has defined a genre: Anyone who speaks of the tragic masterpieces of Belcanto cannot get past it.