Walter Meyer wrote:

>...the blood-curdling story of *Il Trovatore* hardly needs enhancement
>through spectacle.

And, one might add, hardly needs enhancement through acting.  Caruso once
famously remarked that all one needed for a good performance of "Trovatore"
were the four greatest singers in the world.

>The story itself is particularly unhappy

But unhappy in a way that is a dramatic, or should that be melodramatic,
paradigm of family life. (Is it only a coincidence that in writing about
"Trovatore" WM writes also about his family? It certainly makes me think a
lot about my own.)  The story, which in "Trovatore" is much more than the
plot, deals with the unvanquishable bonds, the fateful fault-lines, the
tugs of love and duty, that are the joy and the sorrow of family life. (For
a more recent take on that, see Mike Leigh's film, "Secrets and Lies".)

It is also unhappy in a way that deals with the outcast (contrast
"Winterreise"), the desperation of the alienated, and, with its Christian
sub-text, the paradoxical humanity of the despised and rejected.

>"Ai nostri monti" ("Home to our mountains") in the last act is the most
>heart-wrenchingly beautiful moment.

As, in a poignant reversal of traditional roles, the son cradles his
mother, we see the deeper truth that, to him at least, the crazed
revengeful witch is also at that moment just a little old lady reminiscing
about the good times back in the old country. Mother and son are both (of
course) locked up in a foul dungeon at this point in the tale: brought to
this pass, she has only her son to comfort her as she wanders into senile
nostalgia, and Manrico is able, in spite of all he has been through, to
find forgiveness and love.

Verdi wrote "Ai nostri monti" some ten years after "Va, pensiero".

If you are ever in the region do make the detour to visit the fine moated
castle of the d'Este dynasty in the centre of Ferrara, where you can enter
some of the dank dungeons below the water-line, some with tiny windows set
high up in the thick wall, and read the desperate scratchings on the walls
of some former inmates.

Alan Moss