by Nina Vaclavikova
Interviews: Mario Anzil – Vice President and Regional Councilor for Culture and Sport, Arnaldo Colasanti – Librettist of the opera
As Gorizia and Nova Gorica prepare to share the title of European Capital of Culture in 2025, the Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi of Trieste will present the world premiere of Fedeli d’Amore, a new opera by Giorgio Battistelli. The production, commissioned for the occasion, will debut in Gorizia on Sept. 27 before moving to Trieste on Sept. 28.
The work, described as “lyric scenes for soloists, chorus and orchestra,” draws inspiration from Claudio Magris’s 1991 novel Un Altro Mare and the life of philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter, a Gorizia-born thinker whose early death at 23 left a small but influential body of work.
The libretto, written by Arnaldo Colasanti and published by Casa Ricordi, incorporates passages from Magris’s writings and frames them around Michelstaedter’s friendship with Enrico Mreule, who emigrated to Argentina shortly before Michelstaedter’s suicide in 1910.
“This opera is the story of a long friendship,” Mr. Battistelli said in notes released with the production. “It is loyalty that survives pain; life that is added to life.”
The staging in Gorizia will take place in the unusual setting of the Amedeo Duca d’Aosta Airport hangar, timed to coincide with sunset. The following day, the Teatro Verdi in Trieste will host the opera in concert form.
The cast includes Bryan Lopez Gonzales, a Cuban tenor, as Carlo, and Italian baritone Federico Longhi as Enrico. The Verdi’s music director, Enrico Calesso, will conduct the theater’s orchestra and chorus, with Paolo Longo as chorus master. The production is directed by Simone Derai of the experimental theater collective Anagoor.
The choice of subject reflects the region’s broader cultural ambitions for 2025, highlighting intellectual figures who embody its role as a crossroads of European thought. Michelstaedter’s La Persuasione e la Rettorica remains a seminal text of early 20th-century philosophy, while Magris is widely recognized as one of Trieste’s most prominent contemporary writers.
Mario Anzil, vice governor of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, called the project “a cultural initiative of extraordinary depth and relevance, one that restores to this region its role as a European crossroads.”
Admission to the premiere in Gorizia is free by reservation, limited to 400 seats. Tickets for the Trieste performance are available through the Verdi Theater box office.
