Lecturer to speak about opera culture in Italy

The Marilyn Horne Museum at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford will host a bit of Italy in Bradford when opera author and lecturer August Ventura presents a multimedia lecture titled “There’s Something About Verdi.”

The presentation, which will take place at 1 p.m. June 15 in Bromeley Family Theater in Blaisdell Hall, offers an entertaining glimpse into the beautiful city of Parma, Italy, which is famous for its uniquely vibrant opera culture. Drawing from Ventura’s own documentary footage and interviews as well as extended sequences from a long-lost 1963 documentary about Parma, “In the Mouth of the Wolf,” this program will include a rarefied look at a city and its people that hold the art form of opera and composer Giuseppe Verdi in cult-like esteem.

“In many ways The Horne Museum is the perfect venue for this program,” Ventura said. “Not only is Marilyn Horne one of the supreme interpreters of Verdi’s works, but the 1963 film depicts the very postwar Golden Age of opera and the milieu of its magnificent Italian opera houses that she knew very, very well at the start of her career.”

Horne performed only once at the Teatro Regio in Parma, an anecdote she recounts amusingly in her autobiography, “My Life,” co-written with Jane Scovell. Ventura will share her story as part of his presentation.

Ventura said he believes great art has the power to make us better individuals and stronger societies.

“It might be hard for us to imagine that opera was an agent of social and political change, but that was precisely the case with Verdi’s operas when they were written,” he said. “The Italian peninsula at the time was just a patchwork of many small city-states, most of them living under the oppressive authority of the Hapsburg Empire.

“There was no modern nation called ‘Italy’ when Verdi began creating his operas, and basic freedoms were denied to citizens. It took a long, bloody war of independence to free Italy from foreign domination, a period referred to as the Risorgimento, which occurred around the same time as our own Civil War here in the United States. That struggle for independence had a musical soundtrack — Verdi’s opera — and ordinary citizens during this difficult period drew inspiration from the great choruses and arias whose message was freedom.”

Ventura explained that in Parma veneration of opera and of Verdi can take many forms. Audiences can cheer a great performance to the point of frenzy. Things can also go in the opposite direction, as audiences have been known to stop a performance with boos and whistles when a performer is not up to the task.

“I have been in the Teatro Regio in both circumstances and the feeling is electric and sometimes terrifying,” he said. “This is the world depicted in ‘In the Mouth of the Wolf,’ and this was the world I wanted to explore with my own documentary work.” Ventura tracked down the co-producer of the 1963 film, George Malko, currently living in New York, who told him in an interview that “Opera in Parma is like baseball in Brooklyn.”

Ventura explores the world of traditional opera in articles, lectures and through the medium of documentary film. His Verdi-themed presentations have been welcomed before distinguished organizations such as The United Nations, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera, Sarasota Opera and Parma’s Teatro Regio, as well as colleges and universities and film societies.

Apart from his articles for Opera News, his efforts to promote Verdi’s enduring legacy have been written about in The New Yorker, The New York Times, La Gazzetta di Parma, l’Agence France Presse, The India Times and Radio Free Europe, which profiled him as “Humanitarian of the Day.”