Un Ballo in maschera at La Monnaie

È scherzo od è follia ?’ A joke or pure madness, or is one really looking into the future in Un Ballo in maschera ? This work is a masterpiece of variety, of the fusion of differing stylistic elements, a work that relates first to the French opera comique and then to the Italian dramatic style, with characters who are among the most powerful Verdi ever created. The censor forced Verdi to switch from the original historical context – the murder of the Swedish king during a masked ball in 1792 – to the Boston of the 17th century, but his human and political message is no less forceful. The director Alex Ollé and his company La Fura dels Baus set the action in the near future, in the atmosphere of Orwell’s 1984, where power is totalitarian, while all the characters wear their masks throughout the performance in a bankrupt society founded on hypocrisy.