Il Trovatore review – tanks, selfies and operatic teamwork

Royal Opera House, London
David Bösch’s production, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, commendably looks to its ensemble to bring connection and drama to Verdi’s blood-curdling tragedy

Of the three all-conquering operas that Verdi wrote in quick succession in the early 1850s, Il Trovatore has become a bit of a Cinderella piece. While Rigoletto and La Traviata are pillars of every opera house’s repertoire, Trovatore has been reducing to a more problematic status than it once enjoyed.

It used to be said that all Trovatore needs is the four best singers in the world to perform it. But the real Trovatore problem is the difficulty of making a contemporary emotional connection to the opera’s blood-curdling story of cruelty, catastrophe and revenge in 16th-century Spain. You might think, in view of some of the world’s recent conflicts and wars, that this might not be hard, yet Azucena’s traumatic killing of her own child, which drives Verdi’s tragedy, somehow fails to connect as instantly as Rigoletto’s paranoia or Violetta’s victimhood.

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