La Scala's gala season premiere vanquished bad-luck vibes around long-absent Verdi opera

MILAN — Milan’s storied Teatro alla Scala presented Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” for its gala season premiere Saturday for the first time in 59 years, determined to shake the opera's reputation for bringing bad luck.

The production conducted by Riccardo Chailly and featuring Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, American tenor Brian Jagde and French baritone Ludovic Tezier received 13 minutes of applause, and a smattering of boos from the upper balconies.

“No one booed after my arias,″ Netrebko retorted, with an air kiss.

The premiere is a highlight of the Milan cultural calendar, attracting top figures from the world of politics, business and the arts, although this year, both President Sergio Mattarella and Premier Giorgia Meloni, who have attended in the past, instead traveled to Paris for ceremonies marking the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Netrebk o sang the role of Leonora to American tenor Brian Jagde's Don Alvaro, lovers whose future is determined by a tragic accident. Jagde was brought in on short notice to substitute for German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who dropped out for family reasons.

“I have never felt like this in my life,'' Jagde said backstage. ”It really is so exciting to be on stage in this place, with these people, on this day."

It is Jagde’s fourth time singing the role of Don Alvaro this year alone, and his third La Scala performance, the second alongside Netrebko.

Netrebko called the score of “La Forza del Destino” a “masterpiece,” but confessed recently that she could not identify with her character, Leonora, ’’as a woman of the 21st century.”

“If you are looking at the story, it is basically nonsense, sorry,” she told a recent press conference. "If we are being serious and trying to follow the story, and try to understand, especially the character of Leonora, hunted by fear, guilt, desperation, and in the end what did she find?”

The opera is an ill-fated love story between Don Alvaro and Leonora set against the background of a wars, which has resonance in current global turbulence. A pro-Palestinian protest gnarled traffic in the center of Milan just ahead of the VIP arrivals at La Scala. Unions also traditionally protest the lavish event in the piazza opposite the opera house.

“La Forza del Destino” has not opened the La Scala season since 1965, and has not been performed by La Scala's orchestra for 25 years. The opera has been dogged by superstition that it brings bad luck, so much so that some in Italy will not say the full title aloud.

But La Scala general manager Dominique Meyer said the reason so much time had passed is that “there aren't always singers up to it.”

“We need to understand something, that singers like Anna Nebrenko come once in a generation.”

He dismissed the superstition as “folklore," adding, "we applaud folklore, but we remain calm.''