Un re in ascolto
opera by Luciano Berio
Un re in ascolto (A King Listens) is an opera by Luciano Berio, who also wrote the Italian libretto. It is based on a short story from the collection Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino, but incorporates excerpts from Friedrich Einsiedel's 1778 libretto (as reworked by Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter between 1790 and 1791) for an opera based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. This became Die Geisterinsel in 1798, set to music written by Friedrich Fleischmann. In addition, W. H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest was a source.
Berio himself described the work as an azione musicale (musical action) rather than an opera. It falls into 19 sections grouped into two parts. The work was written from 1981 to 1983 and it received its premiere at the Kleines Festspielhaus in Salzburg on 7 August 1984, conducted by Lorin Maazel, directed by Götz Friedrich, with set designs by Günther Schneider-Siemssen. The London premiere took place on 9 February 1989 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The American premiere was at Lyric Opera of Chicago on 9 November 1996, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.
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Synopsis
The opera does not have a conventional linear narrative.
“Un re in ascolto” enters the record as opera by Luciano Berio. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what ascolto, opera and Luciano can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Un re in ascolto” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, ascolto, opera and Luciano provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 24, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7882067. VIAF identifies the subject as 182037981. The Library of Congress control number is n2011056000. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1778, 1790, 1791 and 1798.
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This entry incorporates text from “Un re in ascolto” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.