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A Paris Play Turns the Life of Verdi into Theatre
Viva Verdi uses drama and music to revisit the composer and his relationships.
What happens when an opera composer becomes the character on stage? Viva Verdi, playing at Paris’s Théâtre Hébertot until 6 December, approaches Giuseppe Verdi through musical theatre rather than a chronological lecture. Pierre-Olivier Scotto wrote the play and Raymond Acquaviva directs. Its story also brings Giuseppina Verdi into view, making personal relationships part of the route into the music.
Verdi’s operas already give audiences powerful dramatic situations. A play about their creator faces a different task: it must suggest the making of that art without merely summarising famous plots or arranging a sequence of biographical facts. The production uses a fictional framework, inviting viewers to consider love, ambition and public life as theatrical material. That framework should be seen as interpretation, not documentary reconstruction.
Acquaviva also performs in the cast, alongside Noémie Bianco and other actors. Jean-Bernard Scotto designed the costumes. The Hébertot stage cannot reproduce the forces of an opera house; it relies instead on acting, lighting and selected musical moments to evoke a career associated with much larger spaces. The limitation may be productive if it directs attention to a person rather than a monument.
The advertised run includes Wednesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons. It offers one way in for spectators who know Verdi’s scores well and another for those whose first encounter is with a staged story about him. Both groups can enjoy the fiction while keeping a distinction between documented life and invented scene.
The play’s appeal lies in that shift of scale. A composer whose works fill theatres becomes the subject of a smaller room, where the question is how an artistic life can be made present through words, music and performers.