La "trilogia popolare": genealogia, ricostruzione, performance

Using the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit (taken up by Lacan and Žižek) as a starting-point for a “reconstructive” theory of musical historiography, in this paper I will consider the “popular trilogy” of Verdi not only as a “discursive formation” (Foucault) but also as a “reconstructive identity” (Ferry, Musi). Another purpose of my paper is to take into account the operatic performances of the past and the contemporary Regietheater as socially determined discursive practices, able to renegotiate, as well as critical essays, the meaning of operatic works. In the framework of a reconstructive historiography, I will examine a contemporary staging of the “popular trilogy”, by whose retroactive effect it will be possibly easier to understand what I mean by transforming the famous Freudian aphorism: «wo “Tradition” war, soll “Rekonstruktion” werden».