Luisa Miller did not attend “Luisa Miller” at the Metropolitan Opera on Wednesday night, but Falstaff and Un Giorno di Regno did. That is not absurdist nonsense. It is a matter of quotation marks. Keep your eye on them. Luisa Miller, without quotation marks, is a man in his early 60s who works as a nurse in an Italian prison and could not take the time off for a trip to New York. Falstaff, again without quotation marks, is an Italian bank executive. So is Un Giorno di Regno.
All three men belong to a rarefied group of opera enthusiasts from central Italy called Il Club dei 27. They are opera lovers, yes, but opera is merely a second love. Their first is the composer Giuseppe Verdi, so much so that the club’s members are assigned specific names when they are admitted — the titles of Verdi’s operas, but without the quotation marks.
