About the summer festival programme of the Sofia Opera

The summer spectacles of the Sofia Opera turned into real great feasts of the art of the opera and ballet of Bulgaria. Numerous are the guests from the country and abroad, who are coming from thousands of kilometers in Sofia, specially for the spectacles of the Sofia Opera.

For the first time on three stages, this year the Sofia Opera offers an exceptionally rich and varied summer playbill. In the historical St. Alexander Nevsky Square, where in 2014 for the first time in front of the temple we presented our own version of the opera super production of “Boris Godunov” by Mussorgsky, we are meeting the great interest of the audience with a new premiere – the opera “Nabucco” by G. Verdi.

The summer festival programme of the Sofia Opera enriches the tradition on our stage for “Opera in the Park” of the Military Academy. For a seventh time we are presenting classical masterpieces from the ballet and opera repertoire.

And the traditional Wagner weeks continue on the main stage of the Sofia Opera with “Tristan und Isolde”, after we presented in May for the fifth time in the recent years the tetralogy “Der Ring des Nibelungen”, just several months after its sensational success in Germany.

The derby between Wagner and Verdi, which continues more than two centuries, is worthy of the attention and the interest for their work also because of the revolutionary nature of both of them. There is one very emotional and fatal phrase in the opera “Nabucco” by the Maestro of the Italian revolution Giuseppe Verdi, which could be connected with today’s demographic, political, spiritual and economic crisis in our country: “Oh, my Motherland, beautiful and lost...”

This phrase springs out of the thoughts with golden wings, so that they could land on rocks and hills of the motherland, on the ravaged towers of far-off glorious times and of the golden harps of believers and poets, with the hope that God would inspire a song and inspire the virtuous ones.

The connection with the weeping and the moaning from the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from “Nabucco” is metaphorical with our days, when on our mother earth are getting born so many talents, people with enormous energy from different strata, but enslaved by the unconcern, the neglect of the valuable, by the political, economic and cultural home muddle. And the fruit of the combination of the material and the spiritual work of art creates the culture of one nation, and without culture what kind of a nation is it...

That is why as an appealing peal and as from the Temple of Salvation, we have chosen to sound the messages from NABUCCO by the immortal maestro of the Italian revolution Giuseppe Verdi.

Plamen Kartaloff
Stage Director