Francesco Filidei returns to the operatic stage with Il nome della rosa, his first opera ever performed at Teatro alla Scala and six years after L’Inondation. Inspired by Umberto Eco’s landmark novel, the work is a joint commission by Teatro alla Scala and Opéra National de Paris, co-produced with Opera Carlo Felice in Genova.
All the performances in Milan — staged by Damiano Michieletto and conducted by Ingo Metzmacher — were fully sold out and met with enthusiastic public and critical acclaim from interational media outlets. The production marks a significant milestone in Filidei’s career and will continue with performances in Genova in 2026 and Paris in 2028, with the word premiere of the French version.
Trailer
About Il nome della rosa
To set up the framework for the composition, Francesco Filidei first of all asked himself what Umberto Eco’s take on creating a narrative would be if he were a musician instead of a writer. The answer lies in analyzing the narrative structure of the novel in order to translate it into musical dramaturgy. A major focus would be to shed light on the text’s relationship to popular 19th-century novels – especially those that came out of France, like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Mysteries of Paris and others – as well as operas from the same period – especially those that came out of Italy, like Don Carlos, Il Trovatore and many more. Eco himself, Filidei explains, points the way when in Postscript to The Name of the Rose he refers to “a book that took on a comic melodrama structure, with long recitatives and ample arias”. In interviews, Eco talks about how inspiration for his writing was taken from Mahler’s collation of various materials for the creation of his symphonies (here we can’t help but recall Eco’s friendship with Luciano Berio and the Third Movement of Sinfonia, which gravitates around the Scherzo in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2). All this to say that Filidei develops his musical discourse as if it were a symphonic load-bearing structure, to which he grafts a succession of arias and recitatives – as if they were autonomous, self-sustaining pieces – the material for which is mainly derived from variations on Gregorian melodies. It is the sacred dimension that justifies the passage from spoken or written words to singing them out loud and strong.
Dramaturgically, the opera – structured like an authentic grand opéra, featuring twenty-one characters – exploits the novel’s construction, in which occurrences are always presented in “story” form, and each is given an aria of its own. Eco’s theological and philosophical reflections in The Name of the Rose, which would be difficult to theatricalize, are reflected in the formal construction of several sections of Filidei’s work, through madrigalisms and leitmotif structures associated with the various themes proposed. Filidei shares Eco’s passion for the stuff of language, whether it’s composed of words or musical notes, and a taste for structure and symmetry. The Name of the Rose is divided into seven days, three of which make up the first act, and four (the last being a short closure) comprising the second act. The two acts take on a symmetrical form, while each scene is built upon a single note: C, C-sharp, D-flat, D… and so on, specularly, all the way back to C. The result is rigorous formal architecture, which, in terms of graphic representation, is labyrinthine, or the enfolding of petals. Which is to say, a rose-shaped opera.
Interview with Francesco Filidei
Behind the scenes
Interview with Damiano Michieletto
Interview with Paolo Fantin
Press quotes
For many of those who have known or read Umberto Eco and were at La Scala last night for the world premiere of “The Name of the Rose”, the opera was a three-hour heart-stopper: fidelity to the text and high quality without concessions to pop, with all that that entails.
Il Corriere della Sera
Habemus fumata bianca: the time for contemporary opera has begun again. Francesco Filidei's Il nome della rosa in its La Scala premiere marks a before and after in the musical theatre of our time. [...] His new opera is a masterpiece.
Il Sole 24 Ore
In his Apostille to the Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco confessed that he saw his first novel as a kind of opera buffa, complete with arias and recitatives. Adapting this ‘medieval detective story’ with Stefano Busellato, Francesco Filidei and director Damiano Michieletto have achieved a tour de force in which complexity gives way to lyricism.
Diapason
The plan for a music-dramatic implementation of the cleverly constructed narrative, full of intertextual references, aroused quiet scepticism, but at the end of the day it was clear: it worked.
Frankfurter Allgemeine
First and foremost, however, the success is based on the musical aesthetics of Francesco Filidei, who, in his words, sought to combine the two major trends in Italian music after 1945, the Sanremo pop festival and the post-war avant-garde, epitomised by Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio and Salvatore Sciarrino, one of Filidei's teachers. Sanremo plus avant-garde? It works in this opera in a marvellously entertaining way, and the Milanese audience, which is not overly open to new ideas, enthusiastically celebrates both musician and composer.
Süddeutsche Zeitung
photos: © Brescia e Amisano / Teatro alla Scala