Don Pasquale
OPERA IC AUDIOPHILE SERIES
Details
In Brief
There are evenings when our Opera House cannot perform because rehearsals are ongoing on stage until the evening. There are audience members who can only afford to hear their favourite pieces with a discount. And there are works that, although very popular, cannot be staged every season due to the congestion of productions. All these issues can be solved at once by the Hungarian State Opera’s new IC series, whose name carries the of iron curtain, but which may also gain popularity with the speed of an express train. Even though it will feature in the programme as a regular series beginning only with the next season, we are already presenting this new, semi-staged operatic format that offers more than concert performances on selected evenings during the current one as a preview. The titles are major works by great composers, requiring smaller choruses but offering fewer but particularly significant soloist roles.
A mere hour after a stage rehearsal, visitors having purchased their ticket with a 20% discount find the iron curtain of the Opera House lowered. The massive double steel plate, covering a surface of 170 m², does not only conceal the set of the next production behind it but also serve as an acoustic reflector meeting audiophile standards. Onto this enormous surface, decorated with architect Miklós Ybl’s engravings, we project a unique video installation, with Hungarian and English surtitles displayed at the top. The orchestra takes its usual place in the pit, while the hand-picked, first-rate singers step through the door in the iron curtain to take a seat at the front of the stage, then step into the limelight when it is their turn to sing.
The form is quasi-concert-like, but the soloists do not use sheet music, they appear in period costumes, and can use their faces, hands, and bodies for dramatic gestures. The participating chorus performs from various points of the building to astonish the audience with a powerful 3D sound. From all this, a single, significant, shared experience can emerge: the wonder of sound that feels much closer to the audience, magnifying gestures and offering a far more intense, truly record-quality experience in an auditorium that is thus transformed into one with the best acoustics in Hungary, the concert hall of the Opera House.
During the 2025/26 Beethoven–Mozart–Wagner season, two Don Pasquale and one Bluebeard’s Castle performance introduces the Opera IC format. In the following season, a series of performances including Don Giovanni, Tosca, and Rigoletto can be expected.
Parental guidance
Events
Synopsis
Act I
Despite his advanced age, Don Pasquale is planning to get married. The marriage he's planing, however, is not motivated by love, but by meanness and the desire to take revenge against his nephew, Ernesto, who, currently the sole heir to his legacy, has also stubbornly resisted Don Pasquale's foolish demand that he marry the rich woman his uncle has picked out for him. This is because Ernesto is in love with the young and beautiful, albeit poor, widow Norina. Don Pasquale has had enough of the lad's disobedience and therefore decides to deprive him of his inheritance. And to get back at his nephew even better, he's also going to get married himself, since this will mean that Ernesto won't be able to ask for Norina's hand at all, since he won't have a penny to offer her.
Doctor Malatesta pretends to support Don Pasquale's ridiculous plan to get married, but in reality intending to teach the old man a lesson, he hatches a scheme.
Malatesta arrives at Don Pasquale's house with the joyful news that he has found an angel from heaven to be the don's bride, and she is none other than his own sister. Malatesta's description of the girl make her out to be so lovely, gentle and submissive that Don Pasquale falls in love with her at once, without ever having seen her. When Ernesto finds out that his friend Malatesta is assisting Don Pasquale, and is even going so far as to offer up his own younger sister to be his wife, he feels horribly betrayed. After writing a farewell letter to Norina, he prepares to leave the city.Since Don Pasquale has never seen Norina, Malatesta's plan is for her to play the part of his sister, Sofronia. Norina happily agrees to take part in the game, if it will help her become united with Ernesto.
Act II
Norina appearing before Don Pasquale is a modest girl from the countryside,who is mortified with embarrassment just to be in the presence of a man. Greatly smitten, the don signs over half of his fortune and full control of his estate to Sofronia in the marriage contract. Meanwhile, the unsuspecting Ernesto arrives, but before he can ruin the deception, Malatesta lets him in on the ruse. Now enjoying the power conferred on her, fake wife Norina turns Don Pasquale's life into infernal chaos.
Act III
Spending money left and right, Norina constantly humiliates the master of the house, even going so far as to slap the don, who is gradually becoming a shadow of his former self. When Don Pasquale finds a love letter addressed to Sofronia, it's the final straw. He regrets getting married and not allowing Ernesto to marry Norina. Malatesta comes up with some new trickery: he suggests that the don can free himself from his hellish marriage if he allows Ernesto and Norino to marry, since if another woman arrives in the household, Sofronia will surely withdraw. The uncle happily allows his nephew to tie the knot, even offering money for a dowry, if only he can be rid of his impossible wife. At this point, the schemers reveal the subterfuge. Don Pasquale forgives everyone: admitting his foolishness, he gives his blessing to the loving couple.
Concert guide
Introduction
Don Pasquale is a masterpiece flowing with unbroken momentum, a genuine opera buffa in which a wide range of emotions and moods unfold with almost cinematic speed, even within a single scene. The opera contains at least eight to ten popular numbers: among them, Ernesto’s serenade (“Com’è gentil”) and the patter duet between Don Pasquale and Malatesta (“Cheti, cheti immantinente”) appear to be the most enduring. There is no need to prove the timelessness of Donizetti’s two comic operas (L’elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale). Their evident freshness and variability (essentially lacking any fixed historical context, instead functioning as timeless emotional topographies) predestine them for longevity. Moreover, it may not be an exaggeration to say that in these works, Donizetti operates a form of modern theatre, especially when compared to his weightier operas aimed at tragic grandeur, some of which today seem more like musical historical wax museums than the kind of direct handling of subject matter we experience here.
Zoltán Csehy