Youthful dreams fulfilled in later years

As Alfred de Vigny once observed, ‘a good life is one in which our youthful dreams are fulfilled in later years’. So mine will not be a complete failure, thanks to the Palazzetto Bru Zane. For this Carmen is the fulfilment of one of my oldest dreams, one of the most cherished and persistent: to produce as exact a replica as I can of a moment in the past, in costumes as close as possible to their period and to the way they were created, as in the sequence from Visconti’s Senso where we see, on the stage of La Fenice, a performance of Il trovatore in the sets and costumes of the nineteenth century.