“On Saturday, March 23rd, an estimated million people marched in London, waving European flags, to demonstrate against the imminence of Brexit,” writes Larry Wolff in Tuesday’s (4/2) New Yorker. “Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, an arch-Brexiteer and the former leader of the U.K. Independence Party, was sponsoring an almost three-hundred-mile march across England, demanding the strictest possible withdrawal under the slogan ‘Leave means leave.’ … That same week in London saw a set of sensational performances at the Royal Opera House, in Covent Garden: Giuseppe Verdi’s challenging masterpiece ‘La Forza del Destino,’ bringing together … the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and the German tenor Jonas Kaufmann…. The baritone, Ludovic Tézier, is French; the basso, Ferruccio Furlanetto, is Italian; the director, Christof Loy, is German; and the conductor, Antonio (Tony) Pappano, is Anglo-Italian…. Set in the eighteenth century, ‘Forza’ revolves around three principal figures who spend the opera pursuing each other across southern Europe, lost in a continent at war.… ‘Everything is in confusion,’ sings [the character of] Fra Melitone. That was also true for the world outside of the opera house during Brexit week.”
Posted April 3, 2019
