"Music is the only domain in which humans realize the present. By the imperfection of its nature, humanity is condemned to be submitted to the passing of time—to past and future—without being able to give substance, and hence stability, to the present."—Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (1930)

Il Trovatore is a ghost story, a dark thriller that tells us how the specters of our need for revenge (Azucena), of our regrets (Manrico) or our unquenched desires (Count di Luna) imprison us and kill us.

Il Trovatore is the weight of the past. That past that haunts us, that past that destroys all possibility of living in the present, the future or love. 

Only Leonora (just like her namesake in Fidelio) understands that love and living in the present are the only paths to follow and she helps Manrico accompany her.  

Azucena—haunted by her mother and her son, who were both burned alive—is the medium through which the past throws its fiery net and consumes everything.

The errors we commit by refusing to freely live in the present repeat themselves like the refrains in the ballads of the troubadours…