Director’s Note:

Pergolesi’s La serva padrona was conceived as an intermezzo – a short, witty musical entertainment. Yet beneath its apparent lightness lies a remarkably subversive work: the story of a maid who, through intelligence, manipulation, and emotional strategy, succeeds in overturning the established social order. What appeared in the eighteenth century as a comic reversal of roles now reveals itself as a sharp lens through which to examine power dynamics, economic structures, and emotional manipulation in contemporary society. This production approaches the opera through a contemporary theatrical language, combining cinematic realism with the artifice of the Baroque imagination. Rather than attempting a historical reconstruction, it reinterprets the Baroque through a modern visual vocabulary. Here, the Baroque becomes a state of mind: a realm of excess, emotional ornamentation, heightened imagery, and the theatricalization of intimacy. The visual identity of the production is built upon the tension between aesthetic opulence and emotional emptiness. The characters inhabit a landscape of stylized decadence, where every gesture is choreographed and every relationship functions as a form of social transaction. The comedy of the opera does not arise from farce, but from the unwavering seriousness with which the characters confront absurd emotional situations. It is precisely this disparity between the triviality of events and the magnitude of the characters’ emotional responses that generates the production’s contemporary humor. We laugh because we recognize in them our own loneliness, vanity, and desire for control. Musically, the production remains entirely faithful to Pergolesi’s score, while the performance style emphasizes its nervous energy, sensuality, and rhythmic vitality. The music is not merely an accompaniment to the action, but the engine that drives the characters’ strategies of seduction and manipulation. The recitatives become almost cinematic exchanges – rapid, intelligent, and emotionally unpredictable. Our La serva padrona is not simply a story about the reversal of social roles, but a reflection on a world in which identity, love, and power have themselves become forms of performance.

Paolo Tišljarić