Music, “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco will be an opera

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A debut whose date has already been written in history: on 27 April 2025 at the “Alla Scala” theater in Milan the opera “The name of the rose”, based on the homonymous novel by Umberto Eco, will be staged.
The Milanese theatre, together with the Paris Opera and the Carlo Felice in Genoa and with the support of Siae, commissioned the work to the Pisan composer Francesco Filidei, while the direction was entrusted to Damiano Michieletto.
“This – explained the Milanese superintendent Dominique Meyer at the presentation – is a very important work. We don’t just want to make a nice evening but an event”.
Indeed a double event, since two versions of the opera are prepared, one in Italian and one in French, as happened in the past for great compositions such as Don Carlo and Don Carlos by Giuseppe Verdi. For this reason, Stefano Busellato and Pierre Senges work on the libretto with Filidei, as well as the playwrights Hannah Duebingen and Carlo Pernigotti.
The direction will be by Ingo Metzmacher, internationally renowned maestro and specialist in the contemporary repertoire.

The film and the TV series

The superintendent also explained that the idea had been cultivated for some time: “We started with the artistic coordinator André Comploi in the summer of 2020. This is a project from three years ago that will come to fruition in 2025, beyond my mandate”. Precisely with reference to the artistic director, Meyer – who also had his Genoese counterpart Claudio Orazi alongside him – underlined how important Comploi’s role is in the realization of the project. With this representation, Eco’s masterpiece, included by the French newspaper “Le Monde” in the list of the hundred books of the century, will also be able to boast the primacy of becoming an opera, adding this transposition to the cinematographic one – with the unforgettable Sean Connery in the role of William of Baskerville – created by the French director Jean Jacques Annaud in 1985 and to have inspired, in more recent years, a television series that saw John Turturro in the part of the investigator friar. “The undertaking is mammoth”, added Francesco Filidei, the Pisan composer who was entrusted with the work who had not yet collaborated with La Scala (his curriculum can already include two works, “Giordano Bruno” and “Inondation”) . He spoke of important choruses and of alternating recited parts with arias. And to this he wants to add a structure of the composition, to use a metaphor, which recalls the petals of a rose.

Anna Akhmatova

But this is not the only new commission from La Scala, which has entrusted Silvia Colasanti with a children’s opera on Anna Achmatova with a libretto by the novelist Paolo Nori and which has already scheduled a new opera by Luca Francesconi for the 2025-26 season .