Verdi's Don Carlos, commissioned by the Paris Opéra where it premiered in 1867, gave a new direction to the Italian composer's musical inspiration: a dark and intense score, in which political, religious and moral questions agitate the characters in the grip of inner torment. Following the tracks of Italian and French grand opera, in Don Carlos without abandoning the melodic richness, the composer of La Traviata and Rigoletto places less emphasis on the love story and addresses broader themes such as the loneliness of power or the thirst for freedom, embodied by the Spanish child, Don Carlos, and his friend Rodrigue, defender of the Flemish people. The Shakespearean dimension of this fascinating opera was bound to attract Krzysztof Warlikowski, whose staging reveals the secret interior worlds of the characters, prisoners of the court, the Church and etiquette.
