Based on Antonio Garcia Gutierrez’s El Trovador, a romantic melodrama set against the backdrop of a fifteenth-century Spanish civil war, Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore has been described as the ‘apotheosis of the bel canto opera, with its demands for vocal beauty, agility and range’. Yet in what is also his darkest and most death-haunted work, Verdi invests the brightness and vocal embellishments of bel canto with greater dramatic tension in realising such characters as Azucena, the gypsy woman who must endlessly relive her mother’s tragedy, and her supposed son, the ardent, loyal, ever mystified Manrico. In this episode of The ABR podcast, Editor Peter Rose reads his review of Opera Australia’s new production of Il Trovatore. Rose worries that with Davide Livermore’s relentless and garish direction a newcomer might be led to dismiss Verdi’s great opera – and opera as an art form indeed – as crass and irreverent.