Ponchielli's La Gioconda runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 29 April to 18 May 2027, in Oliver Mears's production.
Ponchielli’s La Gioconda opened at La Scala in 1876, to a libretto Arrigo Boito wrote under an anagram of his own name because he was busy being a serious composer and this was a paying job. It comes from a Victor Hugo play, it is set in seventeenth-century Venice, and the plot is a machine: a street singer in love with a nobleman who loves someone else, a blind mother accused of witchcraft, a spy for the Inquisition, a poison, a dagger and a suicide. It also contains the Dance of the Hours, which most people know from a cartoon involving hippopotamuses in tutus.
It is the last grand opera in the Italian tradition and it needs six major voices, which is why houses stage it rarely and why the ones that can, do. Boito went on to write Otello and Falstaff for Verdi, so the libretto of this piece is the work of the man who would shortly produce the two finest in the Italian language.
Oliver Mears directs it on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Thursday 29 April to Tuesday 18 May 2027. It is his second production of the spring and opens while his own Tosca is still running, so the Royal Opera’s director of opera has two shows on the same stage in the same fortnight. It also runs against Swan Lake into May.