‘Viva Verdi,’ Say Fans With Very Verdian Names

Apr 29, 2018 770

BY: James Barron

Luisa Miller did not attend “Luisa Miller” at the Metropolitan Opera on Wednesday night, but Falstaff and Un Giorno di Regno did. That is not absurdist nonsense. It is a matter of quotation marks. Keep your eye on them. Luisa Miller, without quotation marks, is a man in his early 60s who works as a nurse in an Italian prison and could not take the time off for a trip to New York. Falstaff, again without quotation marks, is an Italian bank executive. So is Un Giorno di Regno.

All three men belong to a rarefied group of opera enthusiasts from central Italy called Il Club dei 27. They are opera lovers, yes, but opera is merely a second love. Their first is the composer Giuseppe Verdi, so much so that the club’s members are assigned specific names when they are admitted — the titles of Verdi’s operas, but without the quotation marks.

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SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/

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