DONIZETTI – MARIA STUARDA
Antonino Fogliani – Pier Luigi Pizzi – Teatro alla Scala

Mary Stuart is a bleak and emotionally charged drama, whose structure combines the public and the private, reasons of state and secret passions. Many of the ideas arise from the historical and political context in which the opera is set: the England of Elizabeth I, the struggle between Catholic and Protestant Europe, a century of exceptional figures, both in the figurative arts and in literature. Donizetti based the plot on Schiller’s play, which also took into account the enormous popularity in the 19th century of aristocratic heroines whose dramatic lives come to a tragic end.