Arena Opera Festival 2024
Arena Opera Festival 2024
Arena presents the programs of the 2024 and 2025 Festival. 7 opera titles and 5 evening events in 2024 with a tribute to Puccini and de Bosio on their respective centenaries for 46 appointments from 8 June to 7 September.
Before the end of the 100th Festival, Fondazione Arena di Verona looks to its new century of great music and entertainment by presenting the seasons for the next two years.
2024 coincides with important anniversaries, not only for the history of the Arena: the first is the centenary of the death of Giacomo Puccini, the best known and most represented opera composer in the world together with Verdi; slightly earlier than the exact anniversary, Fondazione Arena inaugurates the 101st Festival on Saturday 8 June with Turandot , paying homage to Puccini with its most spectacular and fairy-tale title in Franco Zeffirelli's dream setting with Oscar Emi Wada costumes.
Puccini will also be dedicated to the revival of Tosca , which will see Anna Netrebko as the protagonist in one of her most recent and acclaimed roles at La Scala in Buenos Aires, and a new special project which will see La Bohème for two dates with an exceptional cast in this beloved title fourteen years after its last appearance in the Amphitheater.
Confirming itself as the largest and most popular repertory theater in the world, Fondazione Arena will also stage the most recent productions of The Barber of Seville and Carmen and of course Aida . The queen opera of the Arena will be visible in two different stagings : the first 10 performances will see the return of the "crystal" production of the 100th Festival signed by Stefano Poda, with transparencies, unprecedented plays of light and rich symbology suspended between Ancient Egypt and contemporary art; exactly 111 years after the first Aida in the Arena (August 10, 1913), from August 10, for five performances, the classic evocative staging of 1913 returns, curated by the late maestro Gianfranco de Bosio, a fundamental man of theater and twice superintendent of the Arena, on the centenary of his birth.
About the Arena Opera Festival
Arena di Verona is a Roman amphitheater, one of the most remarkable archaeological monuments in Europe. It was built in the I century. our era, in the last years of the reign of Emperor Augustus. Today "arena di Verona" is known all over the world thanks to the annual summer Opera festival taking place within its walls. The festival was opened on 10 August 1913 with a production of Giuseppe Verdi's Opera Aida. On the stage of the arena di Verona performed outstanding artists such as Renata Tebaldi, Maria Callas, Mario Del Monaco, Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, Luciano Pavarotti, Tullio Serafin, Riccardo Muti.
The Opera season annually attracts more than half a million spectators from all over the world. The repertoire of the festival is mainly mass, large-scale works ("Nabucco", "Troubadour", "Aida", "Carmen", "Turandot").
Although the Arena di Verona has always maintained its vocation as a performance venue throughout its millenary history: from the naumachie or staged naval battles of ancient Rome to the jousts of the Middle Ages, and on to Rossini in the early 1800s, it was not until 1913 that it became the true home of great open-air opera performances, with an Aida that epitomised the Art Nouveau trend of the time, reconstructed from original sketches and still beloved of audiences today.
Always true to its traditional role as democratic propagator of musical culture in Europe, as well as popular, accessible and universal home to musical theatre, loved by opera stars, crowned heads, Hollywood actors and audiences from all over the world, the Arena di Verona has always been one of the most influential locations for inclusiveness in art.