Aleko, performed for the first time in Italy, is Sergei Rachmaninoff’s one-act opera, with libretto by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, based on Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies.
It is staged for the first time with Pagliacci, the drama in a prologue and two acts, with music and libretto by Ruggero Leoncavallo.
This is a new production by the Fondazione Teatro Massimo and marks the Palermo debut of director Silvia Paoli, whose vision brings the two stories together, united by the theme of violence against women.

Composed in the same year (1892), Aleko and Pagliacci come from two composers with very different musical languages and aesthetics. Still, the two operas are similar in structure, in the characters they depict and in the themes from which they draw inspiration: man’s inability to accept women’s freedom and independence, the obsession with possession and violence that transcends into femicide.

The diptych thus becomes a single grand discourse in which the two operas mirror each other as parts of the same narrative that recounts violence from different perspectives, with similar dynamics and characters: a betrayed man, a woman who wants to rebuild her life and a tragic epilogue in which the man, having discovered his partner’s infidelity, kills her rather than letting her go.
This violence tragically echoes in contemporary society.