Presenting the new operatic-symphonic season of the Teatro Comunale Girolamo Magnani is never a purely formal act; it is, first of all, a tribute to our cultural identity and to the civil history of Fidenza.
This year, our deepest thanks go to the “T. Marchetti” Music Promotion Group, which with dedication and tireless passion organizes and makes this festival possible.
In the name of this association lies a fundamental piece of our freedom and our heritage: the memory of Tullo Marchetti. Partisan with the nom de guerre “Full” and esteemed Mayor of our city from 1964 to 1969, Marchetti understood before many others that the rebirth of a community inevitably passes through the rebirth of its places of culture.
It was he who undertook the complex renovation works that allowed the theater, in 1961, to open its doors again. And it is no coincidence that Il Trovatore was chosen for that reopening, the exact same opera that Magnani had inaugurated a century earlier, in 1861.
Today, the “T. Marchetti” Group continues to move in the wake of that extraordinary intuition: to preserve the past to give voice to the future.
The Common Thread: The Weight of Power and the Sacrifice of Affections
This year’s program, which boasts three major opera productions, an operetta, two concerts and six musical afternoons, is not a simple sequence of titles, but a real dramaturgical journey.
If we look for the common thread that unites the three operas in production – Simon Boccanegra, Norma and Rigoletto – we find it in the eternal and lacerating conflict between the public role (Power) and the private sphere (Family Affections, in particular filial love).

Three dramas, three solitudes, three figures crushed by the responsibility of their office:
• Simon Boccanegra (Giuseppe Verdi, 1857)
• Norma (Vincenzo Bellini, 1831)
• Rigoletto (Giuseppe Verdi, 1851)

In all three operas, the stage of the Magnani will become the mirror of the human soul, where the protagonists are called to pay the highest price – the loss or sacrifice of their children – on the altar of social conventions, politics and duty.

In addition to this powerful trilogy of human drama, the program will be enriched by the brilliant lightness of the operetta, the energy of the two symphonic concerts and the intimate and popular dimension of the six musical afternoons, designed to bring the theater to life even in moments of daily sharing.