In the labyrinthine library of a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy, a Franciscan friar is investigating a series of murders. Hooded monks, their habits cinched with rope, sing in a mix of Italian, German, Latin and Ancient Greek. Cryptic clues slip through their lips, hinting at the library’s deadly secrets. Guglielmo da Baskerville, the friar, steps towards a central lectern, his fingers skimming an ancient parchment.
This medieval intrigue unfolds not in a shadowy scriptorium but within the rehearsal rooms of La Scala’s expansive workshop complex in Milan. The company is preparing Il nome della rosa, a new two-act “grand opera” based on Umberto Eco’s best-selling debut novel The Name of the Rose (1980). The piece will premiere on April 27 at La Scala with a separate French version to follow at the Paris Opera in three years.
For the first operatic rendition of Eco’s novel, La Scala has assembled a stellar creative team. Composer Francesco Filidei’s score, which blends intricate orchestration with atmospheric Gregorian chant, has been entrusted to conductor Ingo Metzmacher, a master of complex musical worlds. Damiano Michieletto, the most celebrated Italian director of his generation, promises a visceral medieval staging packed with gory murders and ghostly apparitions. The cast is headed by baritone Lucas Meachem (Guglielmo), mezzo soprano Kate Lindsey (his novice, Adso) and mezzo Daniela Barcellona in the contralto role of the menacing inquisitor, Bernardo Gui.
Condensing Eco’s sprawling novel — 600 pages dense with secret symbols, biblical analysis and medieval mystery — into a three-hour opera has been no small feat. “This project was a dream, but I was terrified,” says Filidei, 51, taking a break from rehearsals in a nearby park. “There were moments when I asked myself, ‘What am I doing?’”
By the time of his death in Milan in 2016, aged 84, Eco was celebrated as one of the great intellectuals of his time, as well known for his semiotic theory as for his magazine columns and seven novels. The Name of the Rose — at first glance, a highly readable medieval detective story — became a global phenomenon, selling more than 50mn copies in multiple languages. Guglielmo and Adso’s investigation uncovers a poisoned copy of Aristotle’s lost second book of the Poetics, hidden by a blind librarian who deems its contents too dangerous to reveal. The library’s fiery destruction is memorably captured in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1986 film adaptation.
Yet beneath its accessible prose lies a semiotic labyrinth. The novel is a web of literary allusions, 14th-century theological debates, and historical references, drawing on figures from Sherlock Holmes to William of Ockham. Eco himself saw it as a literary game, a playful yet erudite puzzle that invites the reader to decode its layers of meaning.
Filidei emphasises his commitment to the original, describing his opera as a “translation” rather than an adaptation. “We used every sentence of Eco that we could . . . We aimed to recreate his language, following his thought process, as if the opera were one of Eco’s novels.” More than the murder mystery, he is drawn to what he sees as the book’s central preoccupation: the search for identity. “Opera has many strengths, but it’s not the best medium for a detective story,” he says.
Like the novel, the score is multi-layered, an immediately intelligible surface concealing multiple substrata, including references to Verdi, Strauss and Saint-Saëns. While the orchestra often plays softly, with just one or two instruments supporting the singers, an exception is the first scene’s depiction of a church entrance: a cacophonous orchestral tapestry evoking angels, satanic beasts and the seven trumpets of the apocalypse. “It’s enormous, like Messiaen,” says Metzmacher during a break in rehearsals. “It’s really wild.”
There are no fewer than three choirs — including a 60-strong children’s chorus — which variously sing onstage, offstage and on a curved elevated stand. “We’ll need monitors to co-ordinate,” Metzmacher says with evident glee. “I love these challenges. The more people I have around me, the more excited I get.”
The score is also a homage to 19th-century Italian opera, with 21 characters given arias and recitatives. While most of the singing is “traditional”, Roberto Frontali’s grotesque Salvatore, conceived as a buffo-inspired caricature, parps and grunts. Gui, Adso, and Ubertino are trouser roles, allowing for female voices. Three countertenors add further timbral variety.
Milan is a fitting location for the opera’s premiere. Born in Alessandria, in Italy’s northern Piedmont region, Eco moved to the Lombard capital in the 1950s to work for the national broadcaster RAI. The city — Italy’s hub for publishing, art, theatre, music and design — offered a vibrant creative scene. “Milan was one of the great European capitals of culture, attracting young intellectuals who found Italian universities closed and suffocating,” says Riccardo Fedriga, a university professor and former collaborator of the writer. “That’s why Eco was here.”
Fedriga is speaking at Eco’s former home in the shadow of Milan’s Sforza Castle, where I have arranged to meet Carlotta Eco, the writer’s daughter. The vast apartment’s walls are lined with endless towering bookshelves and garish neo-avant-garde art. As Carlotta explains, Eco, in his Milanese prime, would meet the likes of artist Enrico Baj and composer Luciano Berio, one of his closest friends, in the Brera district’s watering holes. “They’d hang out at the bars,” she says. “My father would do the prefaces for artists’ catalogues, and they’d give him their paintings in return.”
Following its publication, requests to adapt The Name of the Rose flooded in. Eco rarely consented, and was initially “sceptical” of Annaud’s proposal to make a film, Stefano Eco, his son, says in a phone interview. “He respected the film medium a lot but didn’t see it as a good match for this very complex and stratified book,” Stefano says. Ultimately, Eco changed his mind after more fully appreciating the French director’s unconventional approach to storytelling.
Filidei, who admires Annaud’s distillation of the novel’s complexity into its essence, had long considered adapting The Name of the Rose. He discussed the idea seven years ago with a German opera house, although the project never materialised. Then, during the first Covid lockdown, La Scala asked him to compose an opera based on an Italian novel. As the Paris Opera had also approached him for a commission, the two theatres opted for a co-production, allowing Filidei to write both Italian and French versions — much like the grand operas of Rossini and Verdi.
First, Filidei needed permission from Eco’s heirs — Carlotta and Stefano Eco, and his widow Renate Ramge — who retain licensing decisions for his work. Gaining their trust took time. “It wasn’t automatic,” Filidei admits. “It was a long courtship.”
While Eco was no opera enthusiast, he was hugely interested in some contemporary music, particularly the kind produced by Berio. Filidei employed “polite insistence” to win the family’s trust, Stefano recalls. “It was a serious project . . . an intellectually stimulating challenge that — who knows — might have appealed to my father,” he reflects. “Having major theatres involved also puts your mind at ease.”
The composer argues that the true justification for the opera resides within the book itself. In an essay on The Name of the Rose, Eco characterised the novel as having “an opera buffa structure, with long recitatives and elaborate arias”. He also revealed in interviews that Gustav Mahler’s method of integrating disparate musical elements in his symphonies had influenced his approach to the novel. Filidei says Eco drew heavily from popular 19th-century French novels, The Count of Monte Cristo among them, inspiring his own decision to reference 19th-century Italian opera.
It took Filidei a year and a half to craft the libretto, with regular meetings with collaborators to refine it. The result is a rigorously structured text. Eco’s seven-day narrative remains intact, but Filidei swaps the original liturgical divisions for 24 scenes set in individual rooms, each centred on a single note a semitone shift up and down from the previous. “To create the musical world, I had to start with the structure,” Filidei explains. “It was like Eco, who said he spent a year sketching the monks and mapping the space.”
Michieletto’s staging is dominated by a suspended octagonal “cathedral” made from strips of illuminated gauze that gradually descends to form the labyrinthine library. As the lights are switched, monks arranged on the curved stand behind vanish and reappear. We also see one of the monastery’s inhabitants fatally stung by a mechanical scorpion, another drowned in a vat, extras in colourful animal masks inspired by the medieval bestiary and a monumental polystyrene gate from which limbs protrude.
Filidei says he has not finished exploring the book’s many mysteries, noting that Eco once indicated that he had written a prayer to be said by Guglielmo that he later removed. “I’ve asked Stefano if this prayer still exists,” he says. “Perhaps one day I’ll be able to read it and integrate it into the French version of the opera.”
April 27–May 10, teatroallascala.org
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