In the organizer's words:

Reading trio Bremerhaven: Susanne Schwan, Dirk Böttger and Martin Kemner
Giuseppe Verdi was not only a contemporary of his antipode Richard Wagner in the field of musical theater, he was also born in the same year as the latter, 1813. Verdi is the perfecter of the traditional Italian operatic form, which he raised to an unparalleled height with his genius in a multitude of works. He continued to develop from opera to opera, creating his first global success with "Rigoletto", which has endured to this day, and reaching his own perfection with his late works "Othello" and "Falstaff" - both based on plays by William Shakespeare, a poet he deeply admired.
Verdi composed 26 operas, whose libretti were written by 11 very different poets, whereby Verdi was always significantly involved in the final version of the text from the very beginning. All of Verdi's operas are based on historical or literary sources which, unlike Wagner's, are not based on mythological material, but on material from the immediate political, societal and social realities of the past and present.
The reading aims to illustrate this with three operatic world successes in which Verdi and three of his librettists draw on very different sources. The Bible provides the material for "Nabucco", the drama and prose of Friedrich Schiller for "Don Carlos" and the novel "The Lady of the Camellias" by Alexandre Dumas junior, one of the earliest world bestsellers in literary history, was the inspiration for Verdi's opera "La Traviata", the most frequently performed in the German theater.
Venue: Central Library in the Hanse Carré, Bgm.-Smidt-Straße 10