Philipp Stölzl's new production of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera opens at Covent Garden on 30 November 2026 and runs to 18 December. Jakub Hrůša conducts. Sold out.
Verdi wanted to write an opera about the assassination of Gustav III of Sweden, shot at a masked ball in Stockholm in 1792, which had actually happened. The censors in Naples refused: a king murdered on stage was not permissible in 1858, weeks after an Italian had thrown a bomb at Napoleon III. Verdi refused to change the plot, so the opera was moved to Rome and the king was demoted to a colonial governor in Boston, Massachusetts, of all places. It opened in February 1859 in that ludicrous disguise and was a hit anyway. Most houses now restore Sweden.
What survived the censors intact is the reason it lasts: a score in which the comedy and the tragedy are the same music, and a page’s role written for a soprano that is one of the wittiest things Verdi did. Verdi wrote it between Simon Boccanegra and La forza del destino, in the decade when he was arguing with censors in three cities at once and had become a political figure whether he wanted it or not.
Philipp Stölzl directs a new production on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Monday 30 November to Friday 18 December 2026. Jakub Hrůša conducts, with Charles Castronovo, Malin Byström, Aleksei Isaev, Anita Rachvelishvili and Kseniia Nikolaieva. It is Hrůša’s second new production of the autumn after Parsifal. Sung in Italian, two hours and fifty minutes, one interval.