Written by Patrizio Bianchi, professor of Applied Economics and Councillor for School and Work of Emilia-Romagna Region, “The Sorrows of Young Verdi” is the second part of a work revising Giuseppe Verdi’s life and the story of Italian opera inside the history which has defined Italian national identity for better or for worse.
It is a theatrical text to be read aloud with a musical accompaniment which becomes itself actor of the narration, and the meeting between Mr Bianchi and the “John Lennon” Youth Band and Conductor M° Mirko Besutti has been the occasion to resume and readjust the text for the setting up. The show was first staged in Mirandola on May 2012, during the terrible days of the earthquake.
"The Sorrows of Young Verdi" tells about a boy self-aware, who writes, studies and lives in the Italy of Restoration, after Napoleon’s defeat. Verdi grows outside of any Academy, even with good teachers, and when he arrives in Milan, the Conservatory bearing his name today leaves him out because he is considered too old and “wild”.
But then, passing through cruel sorrows as the death of his wife and his son and professional failures, Verdi creates Nabucco, a “wild” opera, free of any academicism and stylistic frill.
People are the protagonists of the opera, the first work expressing Verdi’s real innovative strength: the extraordinary exalting of the two figures shut out of the ancient world, the individual and the people.
Verdi the innovator, the experimenter, even when recognized as the Grand Old Man of Italian culture will still be a man searching, studying, trying and expecting more out of himself.