Flavio, re de' Longobardi

Margravial Opera House, Bayreuth, Germany

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7:30 PM

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Important Info

Festival: Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival 2023

Type: Opera

City: Bayreuth, Germany

Starts at: 19:30

Acts: 3

Intervals: 2

Sung in: Italian

Titles in: German,English

Ticket delivery: E-Tickets

E-tickets: Print at home or at the box office of the event if so specified. You will find more information in your booking confirmation email.

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Festival

Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival 2023

Bayreuth Baroque will present you two staged opera productions, concerts and much more at the Margravial Opera House, the Eremitage, Colmdorf Palace and two Margravial churches from 7 to 17 September 2023. Artistic Director Max Emanuel Cencic and Managing Director Dr Clemens Lukas have presented the program to the public on 20 January.

Overview

With stage direction by Max Emanual Cenci – who also takes on the role of Guido – we can look forward to brilliant performances by the Bayreuth debutant Rémy Brés-Feuillet in the title role, besides fixed stars of the Festival including Julia Lezhneva, Yuriy Mynenko, Sonja Runje and Sreten Manojlović. They will be accompanied by this year’s Orchestra in Residence, Concerto Köln under Benjamin Bayl.

The Bayreuth Baroque Opera Fesival opens up its fourth edition with George Frideric Handel’s dramma per musica Flavio, Re de’ Longobardi, a piece that has been performed all too rarely until now. As music drama, Handel broke new ground with this work: it is relatively short, and the form of opera seria is creatively and inventively enriched with subtle comedy and elements of satirical parody – forged in highly emotional and powerfully expressive theatre music. It is all the more astonishing that the opera premiered in 1723 in London is among Handel’s least known works, also in the twenty-first century.

The plot takes us into the court of the Lombard king Flavio, who plays off his counsellors Ugone and Lotario one against the other in order to assuage his passion for Ugone’s daughter Teodata. The elders’ conflict is a problem first and foremost for the younger generation: Ugone’s son Guido, who wants to marry Lotario’ daughter Emilia, and Teodata herself, who is involved in a secret relationship with the adjutant Vitige.

History

Premiere of this production: 14 May 1723, King's Theatre in the Haymarket, London

Flavio, re de' Longobardi ("Flavio, King of the Lombards") is an opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel. The Italian-language libretto was by Nicola Francesco Haym, after Matteo Noris's Flavio Cuniberto. It was Handel's fourth full-length opera for the Royal Academy of Music. Handel had originally entitled the opera after the character of Emilia in the opera.

Synopsis

Scene: Lombardy, in legendary times.

Flavio, King of Lombardy, is also King of Britain. He has two trusted, elderly counsellors, Lotario and Ugone. Lotario's daughter Emilia is engaged to Ugone's son, Guido. Ugone has another daughter, Teodata, who is young and famous for her great beauty. Teodata has a secret boyfriend, Vitige, courtier of the King.

Act 1
Vitige slips away from his sweetheart Teodata's bedroom as dawn breaks. The two take a tender farewell of each other.

Guido and Emilia are married in a ceremony with their immediate families present. The newly married couple sing of their happiness and look forward to the wedding party that evening.

Ugone presents his daughter Teodata to the King. Flavio is greatly struck by her beauty and suggests she become lady-in-waiting to the Queen (who does not appear in the opera). King Flavio receives word that his governor in Britain has become incapacitated through illness and needs to be replaced. The King offers the position to his counsellor Lotario, but changes his mind and offers the job to Ugone instead, thinking that with her father out of the way, he will more easily be able to seduce his lovely daughter Teodata. Lotario is furious that the King has backtracked on the prime position he was offered.

Flavio praises the beauty of Teodata to his courtier Vitige, whom the King does not realise is Teodata's secret lover. Vitige tries to play down her attraction, telling the King that he doesn't think she is at all pleasing to look at. This produces no effect on the King's ardour, however.

Ugone tells his son Guido that he has been gravely insulted by Lotario, who has slapped him across the face. His honour demands that he fight a duel, but he is too old now, and demands that his son do so in his stead. Guido has to agree that his duty demands that he kill the father of his new bride. When Emilia meets up with Guido, he is too ashamed to look her in the eye. She does not understand what is wrong, but declares she will always love him, no matter what.

Act 2
Flavio has ordered the lovely Teodata to come to him and is working on seducing her when her father bursts into the room, protesting about the loss of his honour. The King leaves Ugone with his daughter, who believes, mistakenly, that he must have discovered her clandestine relationship with Vitige and confesses all. This only makes Ugone bewail the loss of his family honour even more.

Lotario tells his daughter Emilia that her marriage to Guido is null and void and demands that she abandon him. She tells Guido what her father is asking her to do, but says she will never cease to love Guido. Guido is torn by his love for her and his duty to avenge the insult to his father.

The King orders his courtier Vitige to go to Teodata, tell her that the King loves her, and bring her to him. Vitige and Teodata decide the best strategy in this difficult situation will be for her not to reject the King but to play along with him.

Guido challenges Lotario to a duel. The older man scornfully accepts, feeling that his greater experience will allow an easy victory, but is mortally wounded. The horrified Emilia finds her dying father in a pool of his own blood. He tells her Guido was responsible, and expires. Emilia vows to be revenged.

Act 3
Emilia and Ugone both go to the King, she demanding justice for her father's murder, he justifying his son's action by his vindication of the insult to him. Flavio says he will consider the matter; really he is more concerned at the moment with trying to seduce Teodata.

Vitige brings Teodata to the King and has to listen as Flavio declares she will be his real Queen, which makes him enraged with jealousy.

Emilia confronts Guido, who gives her his sword and tells her to run him through. She takes the sword but is unable to kill him and leaves.

Vitige and Teodata have a quarrel about her treatment of the King as Flavio listens unobserved. She points out that Vitige told her to play along with Flavio, but Vitige says he did not mean that she should go that far. Flavio comes out of his hiding place, declares they have both deceived him and they will be punished.

Flavio now realises that he will have to show wise judgement like a good King. He sends for Emilia and tells her that he has followed her desire; he has had Guido decapitated for killing her father and in fact she can see the severed head right away. Emilia swoons away and while she is unconscious the King has Guido come to her side so that when she revives they are joyously reunited.

He sends for Vitige and tells him that his punishment will be that he will have to marry the girl who he does not think is nice to look at, Teodata, and presents her to him.

So both pairs of lovers will marry, Ugone will go to Britain to take up his position as governor, and Flavio remain faithful to his wife.

Venue Info

Margravial Opera House - Bayreuth
Opernstraße 14

The Margravial Opera House is a Baroque opera house in the town of Bayreuth, Germany. Built between 1745 and 1750, it is one of Europe's few surviving theatres of the period and has been extensively restored. On 30 June 2012, the opera house was inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List because of its exceptional Baroque architecture.

The Bayreuth Opera House was inaugurated on the occasion of the marriage of their daughter Elisabeth Fredericka Sophie with Duke Charles Eugene of Württemberg. Princess Wilhelmine, older sister of the Prussian king Frederick the Great, had established the margravial theatre company in 1737. In the new opera house she participated as a composer of opera works and Singspiele, as well as an actor and director. Today she features in a sound-and-light presentation for tourists. After her death in 1758, performances ceased and the building went into disuse, one reason for its good conservation status.

More than one hundred years later, the stage's great depth of 27 metres attracted the composer Richard Wagner, who in 1872 chose Bayreuth as festival centre and had the Festspielhaus built north of the town. The foundation stone ceremony was held on 22 May, Wagner's birthday, and included a performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, directed by the maestro.

Parts of the 1994 biopic Farinelli were filmed in the Opera House. The theatre was the site of the annual Bayreuther Osterfestival until 2009. Each September from the year 2000 to 2009, the theatre also hosted the Bayreuth Baroque festival, with performances of early operatic rarities. The 2009 festival included performances of Andrea Bernasconi's festa teatrale, L'Huomo, to a libretto by the Margravine Wilhelmine. Bayreuth Baroque was revived in 2020.

The theatre closed between October 2012 for extensive refurbishment and redevelopment and reopened 12 April 2018.

The Margravial Opera House is modelled on Italian loge theatres of the period. The fully preserved tiers of loges made primarily of wood and canvas are installed as a free-standing construction within the stone exterior. The interior of the theatre was constructed in record time with some of the wooden architectural elements and sculptures prefabricated and painted elsewhere. Thus a masterpiece of ephemeral festival architecture was completed from 1744 until 1748 in under four years.

The restoration that took place from 2013 to 2018 re-established the original light and airy atmosphere of the illusionist painting in the auditorium with its overwhelming three-dimensional effect.

The auditorium and stage form a single unit. The large stage portal framed by columns at the rear of the auditorium faces the court loge. The sculptures decorating the loge, like those above the stage, glorify the Hohenzollern dynasty and the founders of the theatre, Margrave Friedrich and Margravine Wilhelmine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth.