A major event celebrating the history of Italian opera will conclude our embassy's initiatives for Italian Language Week in the World.

The Italian Cultural Institute in Nairobi has organised a theatrical, musical and singing performance dedicated to opera, entitled “Opera, amore”, for Sunday 19 October at 3 p.m. (free admission, by booking via email at iicnairobi@esteri.it).

The performance, conceived by Marco Maria Cerbo and Francesco Micheli, written by Alberto Micheli and set to music by Federico Gon, is a project created by the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) and is touring Africa.

The subject of “Opera, Amore”, performed by three actors and two musicians, is essentially the history of melodrama itself, in the form of chamber opera. The classic opera love triangle, she-he-the other, in which the love of the first two characters is thwarted by the third, is transformed into the indivisible relationship between music (the soprano) and passion (the tenor), in which theatre masked by hatred tries to insert itself as a spoiler (mezzo-soprano).

In this love conflict, the great masterpieces of opera are revisited and quoted, from Monteverdi to Puccini, passing through Pergolesi, Mozart, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Mascagni and Giordano.

Thus, each musical passage in the score refers to a different historical moment in the evolution of Italian melodrama, beginning with a Prologue, a sort of “vocal overture”, and concluding with a trio that closes the show with a celebration of opera, the magical spectacle where “everything is fake and nothing is false”.

On stage for this “meta-opera” will be soprano Maria Rita Combattelli, tenor Michele Galbiati and mezzo-soprano Janetka Hosco, accompanied by Carlo Manganaro on piano and Raffaele Diego Cardone on accordion. The costumes and set design are by Chiara Taiocchi.