The Bucharest National Opera opens 2025 with Verdi’s La Traviata

The first week of January 2025 brings to the audience of opera lovers some of the most popular and performed titles from the universal classical repertoire.

Between January 6-12, 2025, on the stage of the Bucharest National Opera, some of the most famous operas and ballets in the world will be able to be admired, such as Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Verdi’s La Traviata and Nabucco.

La Traviata (by Giuseppe Verdi) – Wednesday-Friday, January 8-10, 6:30 PM

Few people know today that Verdi’s La Traviata, although one of the most famous operas in the world, was a real fiasco at its premiere at the La Fenice Theater in Venice, on March 6, 1853. And just as few people know that Verdi’s great composition illustrates an authentic love story between the writer Alexandre Dumas-fils and a famous French courtesan (who died prematurely at only 22 years old), hypostasized in the novel The Lady of the Camellias (1848).

The Nutcracker (by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky) – Saturday, January 11, 6:30 PM

Around the world, Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is almost always performed during the winter holidays, as it has become an iconic staging for the magical atmosphere of Christmas, which was inspired by the 1844 version of the novelist Alexandre Dumas-father (Histoire d’un casse-noisette) of the fairy tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816) by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. Furthermore, even though he gives the title to this fabulous show, the main character is not the Nutcracker, but Clara, the little girl through whose dreams the narrative thread of the opera flows.

Gianni Schicchi (by Giacomo Puccini) – Sunday, January 12, 12:00 PM

Gianni Schicchi by Giacomo Puccini was inspired by an unflattering incident in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno from the Divine Comedy, which centers on Gianni Schicchi, a Florentine who ends up – along with other forgers and swindlers – in the eighth concentric circle of hell for disguising himself as Buoso Donati, a recently deceased Florentine aristocrat, in order to fraudulently obtain his fortune for himself. It is to Puccini’s credit that he saw the enormous potential for social satire in this ancient tale in which the greedy relatives of the deceased feign grief.

Nabucco (by Giuseppe Verdi) – Sunday, January 12, 6:30 PM

One of the greatest compositions in the operatic history of humanity has as its fundamental theme the burdensome history of the Jewish people whom the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II attacked, defeated and exiled from their homeland. It is less known that the historical events – of biblical origin – are used by Verdi only as a background and pretext for a romantic idyll and a political plot with modern reverberations. Giuseppe Verdi, as a great patriot living in a Risorgimento Italy, politically divided and territorially segmented, was especially inspired by the famous scene in which the captured Jews, on the banks of the Euphrates, yearn for their distant homeland, in order to encourage his fellow countrymen. Shortly after the night of the world premiere, the chorus of Jewish slaves from the opera Nabucco spread through the Italian streets and was sung as a revolutionary anthem, inspiring the process of national reunification.