If you like... then you'll LOVE Andrea Chénier!
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Unless you're an opera buff, you probably haven't heard of Andrea Chénier. But most people have already felt exactly what Chénier feels like.
Giordano's opera (OperaDelaware's company premiere this May at The Grand Opera House in Wilmington) is one of the most emotionally devastating works in the repertoire. A historical drama/love story set against the French Revolution. A poet falls for a noblewoman. A revolutionary tears them apart. The guillotine is never far away.
If any of the following stories have brought you to tears, Andrea Chénier will too.
If you like Les Misérables… then you'll LOVE Andrea Chénier
Les Misérables gives you the French Revolution as a canvas for the eternal struggle between justice and power, love and loss, the individual and the state. Andrea Chénier lives in the same world... but instead of Valjean, you get a poet (Andrea Chénier). Instead of Javert, you get a revolutionary (Carlo Gérard) who starts out righteous and loses his way. And instead of "One Day More," you get a final duet ("Vicino a te") that will absolutely destroy you.
Both stories ask the same question: what does it cost a person to stay true to what they believe? Andrea Chénier answers it in four acts and goes straight for the throat.
If you like Philadelphia… then you'll LOVE Andrea Chénier
You already know the scene. Tom Hanks. Maria Callas. "La mamma morta."
That aria, the one that made an entire generation feel opera for the first time without realizing it, is Maddalena di Coigny's aria. It is the moment she describes losing everything and finding, in the wreckage, the will to survive because of love.
This May, Toni Marie Palmertree sings it live at The Grand Opera House. Fresh off her principal role debut at The Metropolitan Opera, she brings Maddalena to OperaDelaware's company premiere of the opera that gave Philadelphia its most unforgettable scene.
You already know how it feels to hear it. Come feel it in the room.
If you like Hamilton… then you'll LOVE Andrea Chénier
Hamilton gives you a writer in the middle of a revolution, a man who cannot stop putting words on the page even when it costs him everything. Andrea Chénier gives you the same thing — but set in France, two years before Hamilton was even born.
Chénier is a poet who shocks an aristocratic party with an improvised poem about the suffering of the poor. He is imprisoned not for what he did, but for what he wrote. His final aria before the guillotine is drawn directly from the real André Chénier's last poem, written in his prison cell the night before his execution.
Hamilton asked what it means to be "in the room where it happens." Andrea Chénier asks what it costs to tell the truth when the room wants you silent.
If you like A Tale of Two Cities… then you'll LOVE Andrea Chénier
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
Dickens could have been writing the libretto. Andrea Chénier is set in exactly the world of A Tale of Two Cities—the French Revolution at its most violent and idealistic, a society consuming itself in the name of liberty, and at the center of it all, a man of conviction facing the guillotine for a woman he loves.
If Sydney Carton's final sacrifice has ever moved you, Andrea Chénier will feel like coming home. It is the same story, set to music that makes it hit harder than any novel ever could.
Come hear it for yourself.
OperaDelaware's company premiere of Andrea Chénier runs May 10, 13, and 15 at The Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware.
Tickets at operade.org/tickets