No use beating around the bush: Mascagni’s operas following Cavalleria rusticana all different from one another have been overshadowed by the fame of the first. A fate in many ways unjust given their musical quality. Iris is one of these hidden gems: first performed in 1898 it is the first example of an Italian opera set in Japan and anticipates some ideas that would soon appear in Madama Butterfly (moreover with the same librettist Luigi Illica). But unlike Puccini’s Mascagni’s Japan is idealized and completely detached from reality as befits a symbolist drama: in an idyllic place among flowers bamboo and streams two agents of evil lie in wait. The victim is a young girl whom Illica and Mascagni follow with masterful skill through the tortuous paths of her mind where dreams and memories of childhood collide with the horror of the world the abduction for the purpose of sexual abuse and finally the agony on the mysterious boundary between life and death. Their creation explores an intimate side of femininity in this case transfigured in a symbolic key.

Iris

Teatro Regio di Torino

Director Jacopo Spirei returns to the Regio to reinterpret another great classic, after the success of Hamlet, and he does so together with set designer Gary McCann and costume designer Giada Masi, winners of the 2025 Abbiati Prize for their work on Thomas’s opera.

La traviata

Not a simple reduction of Carmen by Georges Bizet, but a true rewriting by one of the great masters of twentieth-century theatre, Peter Brook. His aim is to bring an opera to life by stripping away all decorative elements, conventions, and the rhetoric typical of melodrama, and to dig deeply into the theatrical material to reach directly the stark, raw truth of a tragedy conceived in the ancient Greek sense.

La Tragédie de Carmen

Piccolo Regio Giacomo Puccini

His friends recount that when Puccini finished writing La bohème, he gathered them around the piano to let them hear it. Deeply moved, they exclaimed: this opera is about us, it is us! More than a century has passed, and even today we can say the same: this story speaks of the dreams we whisper to ourselves in the mirror, of the desires and regrets that keep us awake at night, of all the great and small losses we have endured, of the winters and summers of a lifetime. Can we love knowing that one day what we love will no longer be there? How can one go on living when death takes away what is most dear to you? And what remains of those we have loved, of all that immense love?

La bohème, first love

We have all encountered Carmen. It is the name of that force that sweeps away perfectly ordered plans, rules, and habits; that force which embodies eros in its irresistible and absolute freedom. “Free was I born, and free shall I die,” says the woman who embodies it in this opera. What happens when fate places her before a brigadier who seems her exact opposite, the ideal type of the “good boy”? Under the Spanish sky, a universal story unfolds: a blinding conflict between passions that we witness taking shape every day—and sometimes tragically—before our eyes. Giving voice to them is the music of Georges Bizet, charged with energy like a coiled spring ready to strike.

Albina Tonkikh

Events

Upcoming events

5 - 18 Nov, 2026

Iris · Teatro Regio Torino

Feb 27 - Mar 10, 2027

La traviata · Teatro Regio Torino

20 - 25 Mar, 2027

La Tragédie de Carmen · Teatro Regio Torino

Apr 18 - May 2, 2027

La bohème, first love · Teatro Regio Torino

15 - 29 May, 2027

Carmen · Teatro Regio Torino

Future and recently performed repertoire

Annina in La traviata by Verdi

Teatro Regio Torino

Mimì in La bohème by Puccini

Teatro Regio Torino

Frasquita in Carmen by Bizet

Teatro Regio Torino

Michaëla in Carmen by Bizet

Teatro Regio Torino

Una Guècha in Iris by Mascagni

Teatro Regio Torino

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