The Finder at the Sferisterio of Macerata (MC) between the orchestral color of FORM and the ghosts of memory
by Marialuisa Veneziano
In the refurbishment of Francisco Negrin, taken up by Angela Saroglou, the Verdian masterpiece becomes a tragedy of time. Dmitri Jurowski and the FORM-Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana preserve its current obscurity, while voices attempt in vain to escape a past that has already taken possession of the future.
The night at the Sferisterio seems to begin before the sky. It gathers against the large wall, follows its immense surface, penetrates into the corners of the stage and remains motionless, as if it waited not the beginning of a show, but the return of something that for a long time has no peace. When the first figures flow from the dark, one does not have the impression that they are entering the scene: they seem rather returned, for a few hours, to a story that has not yet finished using them.
The first character of the FinderIt's not Ferrando, it's not Leonora, it's not the Count of Luna. It's the past. He does not have his own voice, yet he speaks through all voices; he does not hold arms, yet he prepares every crime; he does not appear in the inn, but governs the work with the silent authority of those rulers who do not need to show themselves why no one dares disobey.
On the stage, two long black structures cross the space. At first glance they might look like tables, walks, boundaries; maybe they are all these things together. They run parallel, without ever joining, and force the characters to advance and reverse along an already established direction. They seek, pursue, promise one tomorrow; but every step of them seems to lead them back to what they would want to escape. In this geometry created by Francisco Negrin and resumed by Angela Saroglou, fate does not fall from above, as in ancient tragedies: it was built by men and then left in inheritance to their children. Who had come to the Sferisterio waiting for medieval Spain, with its towers, encampments, armours and all that dignified system of ironwork to which the romantic work has generously accustomed us, could on the first to believe that something is missing. But it would be a short impression. The walls did not disappear: they entered the characters. The war does not occupy the scene: it crosses its consciences. As for the fire, when it finally turns on, it immediately appears clear that it was not called to warm the eye.
In the Finder the future does not come: damp. It has already been delivered to the flames before someone can live it.
The story, as it is known, brings with it an almost bulky reputation as its music. For more than a century and a half it is accused of being obscure, inverosimile, intricate to the point that, to tell it without losing a child, to confuse a mother or unintentionally resurrect a dead person, a family register would seem necessary, the acts of two trials and the patience of a notary immune from dizziness. There are two brothers who do not know that they are, a kidnapped child, another thrown into the fire by a frightening mistake, a mother burned alive and a guarded revenge for so long that she had finished, as often happens to the very devout sellers herself, to assume the most respectable name of justice.
It would be easy to liquidate all this with a smile; and it is precisely therefore that many have done so. Indeed, when it belongs to the misfortunes of others, it is increasingly easier to recognize. Green, however, does not ask the viewer to believe the probability of the facts: the question of recognizing the truth of their effects. Because an event can be exceptional, even absurd, and yet generate terribly common feelings: hate transmitted as an inheritance, love confused with possession, pain that, not finding consolation, seeks a guilty; and finally the children called to weld debts contracted before their birth.
Almost everything that decides the fate of the protagonists happened before the music begins. The work opens when the catastrophe has already taken place, but no one fully knows its shape. Ferrando sends a story received from others; Azucena tells what he saw and what trauma forces her to review; Manrico seeks himself in the words of a mother who loves him and, at the same time, binds him to his obsession; the Count of Moon fights against an enemy without knowing that in him the same blood flows. Leonora, alone among all, attempts to stop that long administration of hatred. But the truth comes to her when she can no longer save: she can only illuminate the ruin.
Nobody, in this work, is entirely where he thinks he is. No one knows enough of his past; no one receives the future he had imagined. Everyone comes a moment after the revelation that could change their lives. The real protagonist of Finder, therefore, is not the finder. It is a memory that ceased to guard and became command; an ancient creditor who perhaps lost the documents, but not the address of the descendants.
And it's so late. — before even from weapons, from flames and blood — that the green tragedy receives its most terrible light.
THE ANTICA FORMA AND THE NEW URGENCE
When The Founder On 19 January 1853, Giuseppe Verdi had already recorded many of the certainties on which the Italian melodrama had built its fortunes. Rigoletto had appeared less than two years before; La traviata She would have been on stage a few weeks later. The posterity would bring together the three titles under the formula, comfortable and now inevitable, of "popular trilogy"; but in the three works there is not a single mold, but a common impatience towards everything that in the theatre had become habit without being needed.
Just the Finder, between the three, it was sometimes judged the most tied to the past. There are the great two-part arias, choirs, caballets, concerted, that succession of moments that musicology defines "usual form" and that some criticism, eager to find progress only where the scaffolds are demolished, exchanged for a retreat. He's a curious misunderstanding. Verdi does not preserve those forms so that he can not get rid of it; he keeps them because he understood that in this history the form itself can become destiny.
The cantabile gives the characters the illusion that time can stop; the cabal breaks that grace and reopens the wound of events. "Ah yes, well mine" shows the man that Manrico would like to be, "of that apira" brings him back to war; "Tacea la notte placida" makes the memory a refuge, "Di così amor che dire" converts it into decision. "The balen of his smile" even gives a soul to the Count, without fulfilling it.
The score therefore lives on oppositions: immobility and race, explained chant and hammering rhythm, intimacy and collective violence. Its famous energy is not only the amount of memorable melodies, but the way they are placed against each other. Verdi lights up the vocal line on sometimes essential accompaniments, even dismissals; it puts on music a pulsation that does not give the characters the time necessary to understand. The debated figures, military calls, the ribbing of the brass and percussions are not limited to coloring the war: they introduce the law into human relations.
The highest point of this dramaturgy is Mixing. On the one hand the choir of religious, severe and impersonal; on the other Leonora, alone with his own terror; far, almost removed from the visible space, the voice of Manrico. Three sound planes coexist without confusing: rite, individual pain, announced death. We are no longer in front of an air, nor a set in the usual sense, but to an authentic theater of simultaneity. What happens, what is feared and what is already lost sound at the same time. Long before the 20th century, Verdi had already understood that the theatrical time can be divided without stopping being one.
The exhibition conceived by Francisco Negrin for the Macerata Opera Festival in 2013, redesigned in 2016 and today entrusted to Angela Saroglou, meets this musical structure without attempting to illustrate it. It does not show us what the booklet appoints; it makes visible what music hides. The scenes and costumes of Louis Désiré give up the picturesque and concentrate the entire universe of the work in a few elements: two tables, a tower, a catwalk, seven lamps, the dark and the fire. Few, he will say; but also a sentence is made of few words, and not for this it weighs less. The two black tables run the stage for about seventy meters. One runs on the right side and in the front; the other, placed on the left side, retracts from the first. The center is parallel. Their outer sides are now illuminated by white, red time, as if the time itself had a secret circulation, capable of cooling in light or lighting in blood. The right table represents the future: not an open place, but a line already outlined. On the opposite side, close to the large bottom wall, rises a black square tower. It is accessed through a lateral opening; it is the point in which past and present come together, and therefore the place from which no one really comes out. The ghost of Azucena's mother lives there, the gypsy led to the stake. Along the wall there is also a walkway that crosses the entrance of the tower: on it the protagonists advance and reverse, as creatures persuaded to walk towards tomorrow while
Black, white and red are almost the whole palette. Black belongs to mourning and to a night that seems to have no morning; white to ghost faces, to death become presence; red to ties, veils, flames and to all that characters believe passion when it is already condemnation. The lights of Bruno Poet, filmed by Marc Heimendinger, do not just make the bodies visible: they establish at which time they belong. The large wall of the Sferisterio, left naked, thus stops being a backdrop and becomes the surface on which the memory projects its debts. Saroglou preserves the severity of the project without embalming it and reasserts it to the new interpreters. Leonora is not a disputed award, but the only creature able to choose in the present against the law of ghosts. The direction mainly includes that Leonora is not a disputed prize between two men, nor the luminous ornament of a story dominated by warriors and sold. It is the only creature that understands the possibility of subtracting from the law received. He loves in the present, chooses in the present, attempts to save a man not for what he represents, but for what he is. If it fails, it is not because his love is weak: it is because it comes to a world in which all others have already promised obedience to their ghosts.
Such an essential scene gives the music a greater responsibility. When the eye is not distracted by abundance, the ear no longer has alibi; and in Finder, that a bad habit can easily reduce to an anthology of famous arias connected by some opportune misfortune, the quality of the concertation decides whether the drama should advance or simply follow.
Dmitri Jurowski addresses the score with control, clarity and evident attention to the overall hold. Its direction avoids both the military emphasis, which makes rough what should be incalciating, and the lyrical satisfaction, which risks transforming the cantables into decorative supports. It holds together stage, choir and hole in the vastness of the Sferisterio, where distances also test the best intentions and precision, before even becoming aesthetic virtue, is a material necessity.
The FORM- Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana responds with discipline, compactness and theatrical sensitivity. It would be unfair to consider it a simple presence in the inn: it is the connective fabric of the show, which allows the different temperatures of the score to belong to the same night. The attacks keep clear; the overall pages find cohesion; the accompaniment supports the voices without covering the word. Above all, the orchestra can change function: it is step in the marches, blade in the rhythmic shots, brace under the confessions of Azucena, breath when Leonora's singing demands space. This aspect deserves attention, because the green orchestra is not yet, in Finder, the great symphonic-dramatic organism of the works tarde; yet it is not at all a helpful accompanying machine. He comments less than he does. Prepare the shocks, put a direction in time, reveals in rhythm what the characters try to hide in words. The FORM makes it perceptible to function without inflating sound, keeping that transparency that allows the vocal line to remain the main place of truth.
Precious Choir Relic Marchigiano "Vincenzo Bellini", prepared by Christian Starinieri: the Gypsies avoid folklore and become a multitude of spectra, while hammers and incudins forge destiny and condemnation. Sauce compactness, precision and projection. The AMS–Helvia Recina Ensemble builds the spatial depth that in Mixing becomes dramaturgy.
THE VOCI, WHERE THE DRAM DECEMES THE TRUE
It is handed down to The Founder the four best singers in the world. The statement, attributed with the usual generosity to at least a few great tenors, contains an exaggeration and a truth. The exaggeration is evident: the world is vast and rarely its four best singers have the courtesy of being free in the same evening. The truth is that Verdi entrusts to the four protagonists very different and equally demanding scriptures, in which the technique cannot be separated from the character without the entire construction losing credibility.
Marta Torbidoni offers a Leonora accomplished: brightness, mobility, tied and musical thought weld belcanto and green weight. "Tacea la notte placida" comes from a silence really listened; in "D'amor sull'ali rosee" the sound becomes thin without losing substance, as a prayer now uncertain of being accepted. Agility becomes will, making Leonora the morally more free character.
Sofija Petrović puts Azucena in the dark centre: a broad and brunito stamp, severe sustained and richness of light remove it to the left effect. In "Stride la vampa" does not tell the trauma: it falls inside. With Manrico, a motherhood contaminated by revenge. Petrović makes audible the crack between mother, daughter and involuntary murderer of his child.
Haiyang Guo faces Manrico with frank stamp, focused emission and musicality. In "Ah yes, well mine" find vulnerabilities; The "of that apira" is governed with prudence more than hurled like an ordigno. The famous acute do, popular court son of tradition more than the page, does not sum up the character. You want a more engraved word, but the evidence grows.
Vito Priante gives the Count softness and authority, without reducing it to the necessary bad. "The balen" discovers the wounded man under pride: evil, in Verdi, is not a mask, but often a pain ruled badly. The line acquires nobility; some acute tension does not compromise a coherent and human figure.
Dongho Kim, round Ferrando, homogeneous and well projected, returns to the initial account the weight of the horror portal. Alessia Camarin gives freshness to Ines; Simone Fenotti is a Ruiz participant; Mauro Sagripanti successfully completes the company as put.
This Finder convinces because it does not claim to make Verdi present by overlapping the topicality. You do not need to add chronicles, occasional symbols or preventive explanations. It liberates, rather, the contemporary force already contained in the work: the guilt that passes through generations, the memory transformed into identity, the pain that prefers revenge instead of knowing oneself. The nineteenth century forms, with their returns, symmetries and repetitions, become the very model of obsession. Extreme vocality is not an athletic performance, but the measure of passions incapable of tone means.
When the last flame is lowered and the big wall returns to be stone and night, the question remains. It is no longer just about Azucena, Manrico or the Count of Luna. It concerns every pain which, not knowing how to burial, we continue to offer descendants; every memory we say to guard while, in secret, it is she who guards us.
The theater, when it is big, does not deliver a moral ready. It does something less comfortable: it takes away an alibi.
And it is then that the fire of Negrin, Saroglou and Désiré stops being scene. It illuminates the public for an instant; and, with that light, it begins to concern us.
Macerata Opera Festival 19 July 2026 – The Founder
Four parts. Libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, completed by Leone Emanuele Bardare. Music by Giuseppe Verdi.
Photo credits: Macerata Opera Festival
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