Salvatore Sciarrino: Luci mie traditrici

Luci mie traditrici, one of the most impressive music theatre works of the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, opens MaerzMusik 2010, the Berliner Festspiele’s festival of contemporary music.

The opera Luci mie traditrici was given its world premiere in 1998 in Schwetzingen entitled “The Deadly Flower”. There have been a number of further productions since then. A new production directed and designed by Rebecca Horn was presented by the Salzburger Festspiele in 2008. This unusual and extremely successful production, featuring soprano Anna Radziejewska, baritone Otto Katzameier, countertenor Kai Wessel and baritone Simon Jaunin, can now also be seen at MaerzMusik.

Responsible for direction, stage and costume design is the internationally renowned artist Rebecca Horn, who decided to take over as director at short notice following the sad death of the production’s original director Klaus Michael Grüber and who succeeded in creating a powerful stage experience with her first opera production. In its shadowy coloured shades, the stage – in the background of which two giant specially created video works are almost imperceptibly altered and mixed into each other – superbly matches the lamentuous homogeneity of the musical content, with which Salvatore Sciarrino sings plaintively of the impossibility of a love fulfilled across eight scenes. Love and death, beauty and decay are inextricably linked in Luci mie traditrici (Max Nyffeler). The voices of the singers are fused in the subtlest ways with the fine instrumental lines of the orchestra so that in the course of the work which lasts some 70 minutes the sense of a love leading to catastrophe becomes increasingly intense.

In Luci mie traditrici Salvatore Sciarrino deals with Prince Carlo Gesualdo of Venosa’s historically documented murder of his unfaithful wife and her lover in 1590. This “honour killing” by Prince Gesualdo who plays a leading part in music history as a visionary, almost experimental composer of the Renaissance is the theme of Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s 1664 stage play “Il tradimento per l’onore” upon which Sciarrino drew.

Sciarrino’s instrumentation of percussion, wind and strong instruments creates a cunning acoustic environment for the voices of the protagonists. The glassy, transparent sound of the instruments serves as an echoing chamber and aura for the vocal parts. The passion of the lovers and the crime are all played out in the quietest registers, in whispers, in shadows and in recesses and yet they build up the most extreme tension, which is ultimately released in the stab of a dagger, albeit in four-fold pianissimo.

Talk with the artist Sun 21 March 12.30 hrs