Opera - Don Carlo - Opera Outside the Walls

By the time Verdi presented the Italian version of his French historical drama, the era of great political struggles was over—for Italy, for him, and for opera. Gone were the revolutionary fervors of his youth. Italian unification had been achieved. His political outlook had grown darker. In power, he saw misery and violence, rather than the possibility of putting an end to injustice or oppression; in the rituals of the Spanish court, he saw the deadly weight of the monarchy and the Inquisition. Only his anticlerical and libertarian ideals find passionate expression in the sufferings of his characters.