2025-2026 OPERA AND BALLET SEASON
This June, Elektra by Richard Strauss at the Teatro Verdi di Trieste marks the important operatic debut of playwright, theatre and film director, actor, teacher and essayist, as well as novelist and poet Marco Filiberti. With his hallmark refined aesthetic, a profound understanding of musical culture, and years of work on foundational texts of Western literature – from Marcel Proust to Richard Wagner – explored through both film and theatre, Marco Filiberti will present an Elektra of strict textual fidelity yet rich in surprises for Trieste audiences, beginning with the orchestra placed on stage and directly involved in the dramatic action, as conceived by Music Director Enrico Calesso.
This new production of Elektra by Richard Strauss, which will bring the 2025–26 opera and ballet season to a close this June, comes under the most auspicious circumstances, the result of an extended process of dialogue and close collaboration between Music Director Enrico Calesso and one of the most unconventional, versatile and independent voices on the European cultural scene: the Milan-born, Tuscan by adoption, director and playwright Marco Filiberti.
With an ongoing dialogue on both score and text already underway since November 2025, the production marks a new chapter in the very way the work has been created. Rather than a juxtaposition of visions later harmonised on stage, it is a single, unified vision shaped through conversations, correspondence and a meticulous study of the architecture of the Teatro Verdi di Trieste, with the aim of bringing Strauss and von Hofmannsthal’s literary and musical masterpiece to the city in the fullest possible expression of all its nuances, without any element prevailing over another. Only once every element had been defined in complete and perfect harmony between the stage direction, the Music Director and the theatre’s production departments was Marco Filiberti’s operatic directorial debut finally unveiled.
Following his studies in literature and music – which also included early work as a performer, ranging from Don Giovanni to songs by George Gershwin, as well as early stage directing for Marisa Fabbri – Marco Filiberti turned to auteur cinema as playwright, director and actor. He began with the short films Vespero a Tivoli and Sulle tracce di Medora, followed by his first three feature films Poco più di un anno fa – diario di un pornodivo (2003), Il compleanno (2009) and Cain (2015). These works were presented to great acclaim at festivals including Berlin, Venice and Los Angeles, and received numerous awards, among them a Special Golden Globe from the Foreign Press, the Critics’ Award at Outfest Los Angeles, Best Film at the Ajaccio Italian Film Festival, the Audience Award at the Terra di Siena International Film Festival and at the Journées du Cinéma Italien in France, as well as the Prix de l’Université de Corse.
A firm advocate of absolute artistic freedom, particularly within an increasingly commercial cultural landscape, Marco Filiberti founded both his theatre company Vie del Teatro in Terra di Siena and his film production company Dedalus. Through these, he has developed highly ambitious projects such as the trilogy Il pianto delle Muse (Conversation pieces – Byron’s ruins – Il crepuscolo di Arcadia) – described by Il Sole 24 Ore as “a true artistic event of total theatre” – as well as Intorno a Don Carlos: Prove d’Autenticità (after Friedrich Schiller). He has also presented a new version of Conversation pieces at the Cantiere d’Arte di Montepulciano in 2018, and, most recently, the film Parsifal (2021), a synaesthetic, fully realised “cinematic opera”, widely acclaimed by leading critics as an unprecedented artistic achievement and, among other distinctions, awarded Best Film at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. Since 2022, Marco Filiberti has also been engaged in an ambitious and unprecedented project: a theatrical adaptation of À la Recherche du Temps perdu by Marcel Proust. The first excerpts, Cahiers d’Écriture Nos. 1 and 2, have already been presented in theatres in Montalcino, Città della Pieve and Padua, in collaboration with the local university. In 2024, Florence also hosted the anthological exhibition Marco Filiberti: alle Sorgenti della Bellezza and the film retrospective Marco Filiberti: La Sapienza rende Liberi.