CONTENTS
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SYNOPSIS P.
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SPONTANEITY AND COLOURS PABLO HERAS-CASADO IN AN INTERVIEW
THE HOMERIC WARRIOR HANS-THIES LEHMANN
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REMNANT OF THE ASHES, WASTE OF DYING SERGIO MORABITO
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AN EXTREMELY MULTILAYERED WORK JOSSI WIELER & SERGIO MORABITO IN AN INTERVIEW P.
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UNDER THE SIGN OF SOUND SPEECH MONIKA MERTL
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ULYSSES’ GAZE TOBIAS DUSCHE P.
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IMPRINT
CLAUDIO MON TEV ERDI
IL RITORNO D’ULISSE IN PATRIA DRAMMA IN MUSICA with a prologue & three acts Libretto GIACOMO BADOARO based on Books XIII–XXIV of Homer’s Odyssey (c. 700 BC)
ORCHESTRATION OF THE ORIGINAL
strings (five-part) basso continuo
ORCHESTRATION 5 first violins AT THE FIRST PERFORMANCE 5 second violins AT THE VIENNA STATE OPERA 3 violas / 6 gambas 2 double basses / 2 recorders 2 dulcians / 2 bassoons 2 cornetts / 4 trombones / guitar 2 psalteries / harp / 3 theorbos 2 harpsichords / organ / percussion
AUTOGRAPH Austrian National Library The only surviving score dates from the mid-17th century and is held at the Austrian National Library. WORLD PREMIÈRE SPRING OR AUTUMN 1640 Teatro di San Cassiano, Venice FIRST PERFORMANCE AT THE VIENNA STATE OPERA 2 APR 2023 DURATION
2 H 30 MIN
INCL. 1 INTERMISSION
IL R I TOR NO D’U LIS SE IN PAT R I A
SYNOPSIS PROLOGUE Human Frailty is subject to Time, Fortune and Cupid.
PART 1 Penelope has been waiting for twenty years for the return of her husband, lost after the Trojan War. Ericleia, Ulysses’ old nurse, is convinced that he will return. The maid Melantho has fallen in love with Eurimachus, one of Penelope’s suitors. Eurimachus presses her to open Penelope’s “heart of diamond” to love again. Against Neptune’s command, the Phæacians have brought Ulysses, his mortal enemy, to Ithaca. Neptune rails against human boldness in rejecting belief in the gods and Fate. Jupiter allows Neptune to revenge himself on the Phæacians. Ulysses wakes in Ithaca, but does not recognize his homeland. He curses sleep, himself and the apparently faithless Phæacians. The goddess Minerva appears. To complete her revenge after the fall of Troy, she intends to restore Ulysses as ruler. She reveals her plan to him. Melantho describes the pleasures of love to Penelope. Eumæus throws Irus out of his tavern, as he is unable to pay his tab. Eumæus does not recognize the disguised Ulysses as he returns. Minerva brings Telemachus, son of Ulysses and Penelope, to Ithaca and confronts him with his father, who he never had time to get to know. Previous pages: GEORG NIGL as ULISSE ANDREA MASTRONI as ANTINOO KATE LINDSEY as PENELOPE
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SYNOPSIS
The three suitors Antinous, Eurimachus and Peisander harass Penelope. Eumæus reports the return of Telemachus and possible impending return of Ulysses. The suitors resolve to hasten a new wedding for Penelope with lavish gifts. Minerva conceives the plan for Ulysses to settle with the suitors.
PART 2 Telemachus plagues his mother with a declaration of love for the fair Helen, who shares in the guilt for the Trojan War. There is a trial of strength in Eumæus’s tavern between the unrecognized Ulysses and Irus. The suitors present their gifts to Penelope. She responds by challenging them to a trial with the bow. The one who can draw Ulysses’ bow will be rewarded with his wife and his kingdom. The three suitors fail, and only the disguised Ulysses manages to draw the bow, with the help of the gods. He uses it to kill the three suitors. Irus kills himself. Penelope refuses to recognize the murderer as her husband. Minerva, Juno and Jupiter persuade Neptune to abandon his revenge on Ulysses. Penelope feels a spark in the stranger of the Ulysses who left her to go to war twenty years before.
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OLIVER LÁNG IN AN INTERVIEW WITH CON DUCTOR PA BLO HER A S- CA SA DO
SPONTANEITY & COLOURS ol
Like Poppea, Ulisse is one of Monteverdi’s late works. How would you describe the composer’s style in this creative period of his life? phc Towards the end of his life, Monte verdi went along with the general cultural trend in Venice and focused on rhapsodic structures, using and mixing eclectic elements to realise his ideas; he preferred to ask questions rather than make statements. We find more impulsiveness and spontaneity in his work. He absorbed all the styles available to him and, with enormous flexibility, adapted his musical language to the dramaturgical needs. ol How does Ulisse differ from the opera L’incoronazione di Poppea, which premièred about two years later? phc Poppea is clearly more “disorganised”, more radical in the sense of allowing the singers more “freedom of speech.” The opera Ulisse, which has to follow the story of a very famous myth, has a clearer dramatic structure to which Monteverdi responds musically. Nevertheless, as with Poppea, the conflict is based on tension and constant dramaturgy with light/shadow despite the “construction aspect.” ol Unlike Poppea and Orfeo, little attention has been paid to Ulisse. Why is that? Previous pages: SCENE
phc Probably because Orfeo and Poppea are more extreme and therefore have more “distinct” identities. In Ulisse, it is difficult to see where the comedy ends and the tragedy begins, the boundaries are more blurred, everything is more ambiguous. Until now, Ulisse has been performed less frequently and is therefore simply less familiar. I am sure that this will change in the future and we will see this brilliant masterpiece on stage more often. ol The first public opera house was established in Venice in 1637. Is the influence of this public opera noticeable in Ulisse – as opposed to court music theatre? phc Naturally. There are many dance fragments, scenic effects, caricature-like references within an unusual structure. This constantly leads to surprises and contrasts. The lively action, the spirited music, the humanness of the characters and the emotional impact captivated the audience. ol The surviving score essentially consists of just two lines of music. How do you create an instrumentation from this? phc The surviving notation was common at the time and the musicians were of course able to implement it immediately. When making music, you have to be completely in the moment and attentive: artistic impulsiveness and creativity
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are extremely important for this music – and that is exactly how Monteverdi invites us to be. We have a very powerful tool that Monteverdi could only dream of: a large orchestra that allows me to present countless colours and textures. We do know that Monteverdi preferred large ensembles for important productions and festivals. We know his tastes and his sound preferences. For example, he acquired two psalteries for the Basilica of San Marco – and so we use them too. There are paintings from the period that show us what kind of ensemble and instruments he had at his disposal. And we have records of the invoices that instrumentalists drew up in San Marco and also from the first public theatres; these all give us an indication of the orchestral line-ups of the day. ol What instruments are used for the basso continuo? phc In our production we have an extensive continuo group, which I think corresponds to Monteverdi’s desire for variety: viola da gamba, guitar, three chitarroni, two double basses, two bassoons, two harpsichords, organ, harp and two psalteries. The composition and combination of this group changes not only from scene to scene, but sometimes even from phrase to phrase, from word to word! In a way, it’s like painting and sculpting. ol There are several tiers in Ulisse: gods, allegories, and people. Are these different groups given different musical treatment? phc Yes, they differ significantly in the way they are realised musically. Monteverdi not only used the musical vocabulary that was available at the time, but also invented new ways of writing for the singing voice. In so doing, he expanded the theatrical possibilities, sur-
prising and “shocking” the audience with effects and tricks. ol How does Monteverdi describe his characters musically? The gods, the protagonists – but also characters like Iro? phc Iro is clearly a buffo character – the first in the history of opera! The role is full of strong contrasts and numerous interruptions; he switches from his singing voice to his natural voice. Eumete, the shepherd, has a very honest and simple style of singing. Melanto and Eurimaco demonstrate passion, simplicity and (mood) contrasts that are in keeping with this young couple. The gods have the most virtuoso and demanding singing roles ever written until then: they demonstrate their power with extreme tessitura changes, endless coloratura passages, ornamentation, and long phrases. Interestingly, Ulisse navigates many different moods and singing styles, depending on the needs of the dramatic moment – he can sound like the shepherds, but also like the gods. ol Penelope is sung by a mezzo-soprano. Is that an indication that after twenty years of waiting she is no longer quite such a young woman? phc It is not necessarily a question of age. I think that the choice of this vocal range has more to do with the fact that Penelope analyses a situation from the outset and keeps her distance: musically too, with the pitch and tessitura of her voice, which give her a certain “solemnity.” ol And is there a musical separation between the main roles and comic roles? phc I am quite sure that Monteverdi did not think in these categories. Each individual character is extremely important
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PA BLO HER A S- CA SA DO IN A N IN T ERV IEW
in this drama. It was primarily about the theatre, and everything that brought the performance to life was important. ol The transitions between recitatives and arias are often fluid. Is that a challenge because it means there are fewer formal structures? phc Not at all. It is precisely the fluidity that is the basis of a special kind of discussion, especially in Ulisse, where nothing is clear. An aria emerges out of nowhere and disappears again – this is exactly what the piece is about: losing oneself in order to find oneself. Another challenging and important aspect is integrating the dance rhythms that emerge and disappear in the middle of a phrase. All this makes the musical and dramatic flow interesting and stimulating. ol The final duet of the opera – can it be compared to the one in Poppea?
phc At first glance, in terms of the plot, it is comparable: the principal couple ends the opera. In Poppea this duet (probably written by Ferrari and inserted by Monteverdi) shows that love – any kind of love – clearly triumphs. In Ulisse this duet is more ambiguous. Although the text is basically positive, it also means “my earlier torment led to blessing”, in other words: happiness comes from suffering. Monteverdi shows this bitter message through complex modulations, asymmetrical structures and by isolating the two voices: only at the very end of the duet do Penelope and Ulisse sing together. The impression is that neither of them knows any more who they are, but they have the strength to keep looking forward. The music opens up a ray of light on the horizon. The soft, beautiful and tender (if somewhat enigmatic) ending leaves a question mark.
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ISABEL SIGNORET as MINERVA
ANDREAS LÁNG IN AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSSI WIELER & SERGIO MORABITO
AN EXTREMELY MULTILAYERED WORK al
The Odyssey is part of human mythology. How far do you as a team of directors lead this myth together with what Monteverdi and librettist Badoaro have created in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria? sm Myth isn’t an exclusively positive term. We still live in mythical times, because our human fragility is subject to irrational powers and forces. We see making myths transparent as part of our modern experience as a central motive in our work in theatre. Which is what the ancient tragedians did in putting widely known mythical relationships on the stage to desacralise them and make them transparent for their own times and their needs and conflicts. It’s a matter of reflecting our fears, needs, pain and hopes in the cultural myths that have been handed down. jw For this opera, Monteverdi and Badoaro have chosen their very own perspective on the traditional hero story, which directs our attention to
human vulnerability. The prologue precedes the action in which all the characters – humans or gods – are fragile and carry big question marks. Naturally, you have Homer’s narrative at the back of your mind when you’re working, there’s no way around it, but the decisive thing is that in the opera this isn’t simply repeated but explored for its contradictions and potential pain. We should not fall into the error of understanding mythical events familiar to us from their outcome – as it were, the wrong way round – but note the steady flow of gaps and breaks in the presumed continuity of the events. al The opera is called Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria – there seems to be a particular focus on the word “ritorno.” Why this complicated title, why not simply Ulisse? jw It’s very striking. This describes an opera which isn’t that short, and which is all about simply the moment of return of the title figure and his reunion with his wife, Penelope. The focus isn’t
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AN EXTREMELY MULTILAYERED WORK
on the previous years which are the basis of his famed heroic status, but only on the final step he has to take after he’s already arrived at his home at the beginning. Who is Ulysses at this point in his life? In the twenty years of his absence – ten years of war, ten years of wandering – he’s not only aged, but also been changed by his deeds and misdeeds. His wanderings, and also his failure to recognise his home at the start of the opera must be understood in an existential sense. He may have landed in Ithaca physically, but he has become strange and incomprehensible to himself. His home is in a way the mirror where he can perceive the difference in himself. This is why he hesitates after his encounter with his son Telemachus to go to Penelope with him, which would have been the most human and obvious reaction. A psychologist would talk about guilty feelings here which hold him back. sm This non-identity of Ulysses will also plague Penelope until the finale of the piece. In Homer she is almost a marginal figure, she is considerably upgraded in the opera. Her plaintive monologue at the start of the first act is also an initial high point. We see a woman who is deeply wounded and traumatised in her inmost being, who feels Ulysses’ long absence as a betrayal of love. Penelope rejects the suitors, because she doesn’t want to experience another comparable emotional hurt. This also shows the greatness of a love which cannot heal. This is another reason why she takes so long to recognise her husband in the homecomer, who has become a different person to the one she loved. jw Recognise is the important word. She sees that he is Ulysses at first
glance. When he turns her suitors into a bloodbath, she witnesses his warriorlike coarsening and brutalisation. The alienation between the two is explored in appropriately nuanced terms in all its ramifications, including musically. al Are we looking at a happy ending to the opera? jw I think the work is too complex to break it down to a clear common thread. I’d prefer to talk about an open end. A return to the original relationship is impossible, but perhaps a new form of getting to know each other is – because they can’t simply strip out all the killings and traumatisation from body and soul. Perhaps they’ll be happy in a different way. al What makes this new alliance possible? sm It’s a question of how he tries in his despair about her rejection to formulate things in their encounter in the finale of the piece. You could mistakenly read his words as heroic. But in fact Ulysses tells Penelope that he’s a product of this war, a mortal who wanted to survive, although at the mercy of mythical powers. This confession of his own powerlessness together with his own guilt allows Penelope to reach out to him again. jw She feels – and we show this – that this is something like shucking off a shell, revealing a wound. However, this process is only made possible by singing a song. sm In fact, Penelope only abandons the recitative-like declamatory mode of expression at two points in the entire opera. We’re not looking at the operatic convention of later times in which the process of singing as such is no longer an issue. This gives the two moments we’re talking about par-
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JOSSI WIELER & SERGIO MORABITO IN AN INTERVIEW
ticular dramatic weight. Penelope is to a certain extent like the actress in a Shakespearean play who sings a song in a specific dramatic situation. And this song breaks through Ulysses’ defences. al There are numerous changes of location in the action of the opera. How did you deal with this staging challenge? sm It’s even more complicated than that. Besides the changes of location, there’s the fact that a lot of things happen at the same time in the action. Although the great monologues of Ulysses and Penelope are presented in sequence, they actually happen at the same time. So for a long stretch of the piece, we’re watching the two parallel universes of the couple in a sort of synoptic view in which they approach each other, gradually at first, and then to the point of reciprocal awareness. jw Just as with Shakespeare, it can’t be a matter of creating a set for each localisation. Inspired among other sources by one of Martin Kippenberger’s art installations, Anna Viebrock has created a set which gathers objects which are fragmented in appearance and reduced. This is all built on a turntable, which makes endless constellations possible. sm This means we never lose sight of the individual points in the action. You see what’s developing in parallel, and not least Ulysses and Penelope are simultaneously present right from the start, even if they haven’t yet met. al The central element of the set is Penelope’s loom, which is familiar from the epic. Why has this particular detail been fixed upon so strikingly and visibly? sm The big loom symbolises the world of Ithaca, and conversely it shows how
Penelope is trying to turn her grief into a creative process, without being able to free herself entirely from it. jw Through its central position on the axis of the turntable, the loom also marks the centre of a labyrinth which Ulysses, who never finds his way out of his mental prison, wants to reach. The loom is also the symbol of the search for personal identity. al This production uses multiple projections at the same time and in different ways. sm One of the projection surfaces is the loom or the piece that Penelope is working on. The video artist Tobias Dusche is working here with a sequence which is significant in film history, in which the Manaki brothers (two pioneers from the silent film era) have filmed their grandmother spinning. In our context, this projection says something about the passing of time and ageing, and at the same time documents a certain role for women in a patriarchal system. jw By contrast, the projections onto the sail rigged over the stage are generated by a live camera. They show the gods’ view of the mortal world, in a thoroughly ironic broken way. al The world of the gods is a separate level in this work. Minerva in particular has a decisive influence on events. Who or what are the gods in this production? jw Our thoughts are based on the idea that the elevated gods, who are travelling in business class seats, have lost their original power and are trying to regain it. Ulysses is misused to some extent for this project and brought into line, particularly by Minerva. sm In a positive reading, the figure of Ulysses can also be seen as an explorer
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who has shaken off the traditional boundaries of his home and set out into unknown worlds. But ultimately the gods succeed in reversing this development and subjecting mortals to their power again. A phenomenon we’re experiencing again in a metaphorical sense when autocratic systems and forces are sacralise themselves.
jw You could describe Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria as a simple homecoming opera at first glance. However, the central themes of human vulnerability and the Counter-Enlightenment forces show that we’re looking at a much more complex piece.
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MONIKA MERTL
UNDER THE SIGN OF SOUND SPEECH In May 2021, Concentus Musicus celebrated its début at the State Opera with L’incoronazione di Poppea. It was followed in 2022 by L’Orfeo, the oldest of Monteverdi’s surviving music theatre works. Now the cycle is rounded off with Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria: the “favola in musica” first heard at the court of Mantua in 1607 was followed by the “dramma in musica”, which premièred in 1640 at a public opera house in Venice. Early on, Concentus Musicus also looked into Ulisse. In 1967, Nikolaus Harnoncourt developed a performance for the radio station Sveriges Radio Stockholm based on the transcript preserved in Vienna. The recording was made in 1971 as part of the Teldec series “Das alte Werk”.
PRESENTING THE POETRY TO BEST EFFECT At that time, Harnoncourt gave an indepth explanation of the uniqueness of Ulisse and its significance in music JÖRG SCHNEIDER as IRO ROBERT BARTNECK as EUMETE
history, of the difference between the “favola” and the “dramma”, which were composed 33 years apart – a period in which art developed from the Renaissance to the Baroque, but from which hardly any of Monteverdi‘s prolific works have been passed down to us. “In the two late operas Ulisse and Poppea, the musical focus, which in Orfeo was still on madrigals, has already shifted”, says Harnoncourt. “Monteverdi‘s main focus here is presenting the text to best effect; the music must never distract from this, never be an end in itself. It must underscore and reinforce the meaning of the text to interpret and vitalise it, such that the listener is reached via two antennas, as it were. Of course, there can be no arias in these operas, no complete pieces of music at all, as they would only detract from the main purpose – optimal presentation of the poem.” Thus, Ulisse can in principle be regarded as a single long recitative, grouped by the orchestra‘s interludes – very different from baroque opera with its sequence of arias and recitatives,
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MONIKA MERTL
which made its triumphal appearance a little later. “There the singer in each case was both the attraction and the crux; the text, the dramatic action, became less and less important”, says Harnoncourt, who in this context also refers to the quality of the librettos, which Monteverdi selected with particular care, “on the one hand based on the beauty of the poetic language, on the other hand based on very specific emotions and contrasts that he wanted to represent musically.” Librettist Giacomo Badoaro also drew the material of Ulisse from Homer‘s Odyssey, thus moulding one of the great myths of world literature for music theatre.
TERRACE SEATS FOR THE MUSICIANS In May 1971, before recording began, Concentus Musicus made its first foray onto the opera stage with Ulisse – at the Theater an der Wien, as part of the Vienna Festival. It was not easy to get the unconventional project accepted by then artistic director Ulrich Baumgartner, who, for economic reasons, was more interested in guest performances by famous foreign ensembles than in an exotic-looking special project by the controversial so-called “knight of the gut string”. Decades later, in a conversation Harnoncourt had with Milan Turkovic for the Concentus biography The Strangest Viennese in the World he recalled the effort he had to put into winning Baumgartner over: “I don‘t know how many times I went to see Baumgartner to keep presenting fresh arguments. At issue was a work that was completely unknown, but that was closely tied to
Vienna because the only source is in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.” When the time finally came, although he still had no experience at all with stage projects, he secured the cooperation of someone well versed in such projects: Federik Mirdita, a school friend from Graz, was hired for the production. Riko had already proved himself in his youth as a colleague in Nikolaus’ legendary puppet theatre and was now a successful director. And Riko knew what was important. Since Nikolaus would as usual be conducting the performance from his chair in the ensemble – in this case the tenor viola – a solution had to be found for the orchestra. So Concentus appeared in a prominent position at its opera début: costumed and integrated in the stage design. “That was the only time that I had a stage set built as terraces for the orchestra”, Mirdita later said. “The set designer Hannes Rader
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The stage designed by HANNES RADER
UNDER THE SIGN OF SOUND SPEECH
constructed a special terrace seat for each individual musician so that all participants could maintain direct eye contact.” Incidentally, Concentus included the then seventeen-year-old daughter of Alice and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Elisabeth, who was studying the recorder and was about to graduate from the music academy. It goes without saying that in order to take part she had to complete a thoroughly professional admissions process with an audition before Jürg Schaeftlein. Franzi, the youngest, was given the task of operating the bellows for the organ. A recording was made in parallel with the performance series, with the roles of Ulisse and Telemaco recast for scheduling reasons. “The organ, the regal and the harpsichord travelled between the Theater an der Wien and the Casino Zögernitz”, Nikolaus reported in the memoir We are a Community of Explorers, published by Alice Harnoncourt from the estate. “Particular ingenuity: despite my elaborate recording plan, we forget five bars of music for Kai Hansen (Telemaco) who had travelled from Copenhagen. He had to come back especially to get that corrected. It will be a wonderful recording. At the end, a big party at a Heuriger with Heinrich Weritz from Teldec and everyone involved.”
the “artistic conscience of the easy-going city of Vienna.” The local press, on the other hand, reacted ambivalently, not just because the intellectual wit of Mirdita’s “Brechtian” austere production seemed a little too advanced for local standards and there were no big opera “names” amongst the soloists. Above all, audiences could not come to terms with the strange, alienating effect of the rich overtone spectrum of the old instruments, which was described as having “rigid beauty” and “unwelcome harshness” and which people in this country did not come to like for quite some time. Some probably still remembered the philharmonic sound of Poppea introduced by Karajan and which had been performed at the State Opera until 1970. “The fate of the repatriates was as the fate of home-comers usually is: sad,” was the ironic and trenchant summary. “Ulisse will probably travel again soon. To the archives.” For Harnoncourt, the performance was his first and only engagement at La Scala in Milan, where, like it or not, he had to go to conduct at the end of 1972 to familiarise the Italian orchestra with the musical language. In 1977, Ulisse celebrated its brilliant première as part of the Zürich Monteverdi cycle, directed
THE FATE OF A REPATRIATE? The festival production of Ulisse turned out to be an important breakthrough. “The audience went wild, the way they do at a solid Verdi opera”, Harnoncourt said later. The critics who had come from Germany were also enthusiastic, and Harnoncourt was even described as
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ROTRAUD HANSMANN as MINERVA in the Festwochen production of Ulisse
MONIKA MERTL
by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. And when the Zürich Opera House brought out a new Monteverdi cycle with its Orchestra la Scintilla at the beginning of the new millennium, Harnoncourt once again tackled the “dramma in musica.” In Klaus Michael Grüber’s production, with young singing actors such as Vesselina Kasarova, Dietrich Henschel and Jonas Kaufmann, Homer’s returnee had finally arrived in the present day. Harnoncourt did not, however, work on Ulisse again with Concentus Musicus. For Erich Höbarth, the concertmaster at this performance, this is therefore his first encounter with this work – although not with the composer, as he took part in the Salzburg Poppea in 1993. “Most of the music in these pieces falls to the continuo, the orchestra only performs the ritornellos”, he says. “But it is a very exciting to see how these two instrumental parts grow together over the course of the rehearsals.”
HOW THE SOUND IS CREATED Continuo is the name given to the small group within the orchestra whose task is to practically realise the basso continuo. Back then, composers merely wrote down the intellectual framework of their piece, notating the chords for the instrumental accompaniment as a “figured bass”, the execution of which was left to the skill and taste of the respective musicians. However, financial circumstances also played a role. The fact that Monteverdi’s Ulisse was premièred at a public opera house suggests that the available instrumental ensemble was originally far more limited than that of Orfeo, for which
completely different resources were available at the court in Mantua. “The première should probably be imagined as very purist, with only simple strings and a few wind instruments supporting the bass”, says Reinhard Führer, the harpsichordist and organist of Concentus. “But we are trying to create the same rich sound for this work as well. With Orfeo we are lucky that two printed scores have survived; in them Monteverdi specified the desired instrumentation. We are guided by that.” The characterising function of the instruments plays an important role here. The three different spheres in which the action is set – gods, allegories, and humans – are assigned to the corresponding sound spheres. “The organ usually plays with the gods; this is also more sacred music, composed in a stricter setting”, explains Führer. “The sound world of the allegories, on the other hand, is high and thrilling. These are the exuberant soprano voices accompanied by harp and salterio.” The tragicomic figure of the parasite Iro, on the other hand, is completely earthly “the entire lower plucked section matches his: chitarroni for the rhythm, lots of harpsichord and dulcian. – The continuo works in principle like an organ: you pull out the appropriate stop as needed.” In general, it is based on individual decisions how a character or a scene should be realised instrumentally. “But you can‘t take an orthodox approach”, stresses Führer. “The most important thing is to convey the emotion in each case. For example, we will not accompany the duet between Telemaco and Ulisse – a very tender, intimate encounter – with the whole ensemble.” Reinhard Führer and lutenist Hubert Hoffmann were included in stage
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rehearsals from the very beginning. While the singers, coached on the Bösendorfer, worked on their vocal interaction, Hubert explored the possible integration of a lute consort, which he had conceived of to support the plot and the characters dramatically. In Renaissance music, a consort is an ensemble of at least two to five or more instruments, although the type of instrument is not specified in the composition. The choice was left to the performers. Often, entire families of instruments, such as viols or flutes, from the soprano to the bass register, were used for consort playing, but mixed line-ups are also possible. For the Ulisse continuo ensemble, Hubert Hoffmann put together a threepiece lute consort. The large theorbo, which stands around two metres tall with body and neck, is tuned in G and has the function of reinforcing the bass, where it can also offer virtuoso runs; the slightly shorter chitarrone is in A and mainly contributes the chords; the smaller archlute, again in G, takes the upper voice and has a melodic function. This lute consort, in which Hoffmann himself plays the middle instrument, always plays together and, with its ability to achieve the finest dynamic differentiation, forms the acoustic contrast to the harpsichords. “Lutes can be really loud, but also very quiet”, explains Hoffmann, so they can be used both for dramatic accents and for the subtle description of situations, for example when Ulysses wakes up on his home shore.” In addition, they have an important dramatic task: they accompany the two characters in the opera who are not specific types, but carefully differentiated characters who undergo a transformation over the course of the
plot and enable the audience to identify with them – Penelope and Ulysses. For his part, Reinhard gave a great deal of thought to making the figured bass as impressive as possible. “You have to spend a lot of time on that, there is extensive leeway for inspiration because there are no original sources to guide you. You sit for hours over three bars and think about whether there should be a major or a minor chord at the end. It’s real nerd work”, he says cheerfully, revealing that he is completely in his element. This is not his first experience with Monteverdi’s Ulisse. When he completed his two-year master’s degree in basso continuo with Jesper Christensen at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, he took part in a performance at the theatre in Lucerne. “Those of us from the Schola were there as a continuo group. I am very grateful for the experience, and I still benefit from it. And I am excited to be playing the work again now.” Führer has also worked on the productions of Poppea and Orfeo. How does it feel to play music at the State Opera? “The distance to the stage that we have to cover when listening in the huge space is insane”, he says, describing the intimidating experience of moving from the rehearsal stage to the hall for the first time. But the trained ear finds unforeseen possibilities to let imagination run free. And as soon as the processes have been established, the most wonderful freedom for creative collaboration opens up. “We play each performance a little differently, we decide this at short notice immediately beforehand, it works on demand”, says Führer. “Every evening is an individual performance.”
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THE HOMERIC WARRIOR The swell of the epos literally envelops bodies, people, things, events and discourse in a spate of evenly flowing hexameter. In his historical-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic, Lukács idealistically interpreted mythical-epic reality as a “blissfully existing totality of lifes”. However, this romantic projection fails to recognise that the unbrokenness of Homer’s heroes is an element of war: not only in the sense of the actual tumult of battle, but also because of the blindly accepted power system of a mythical compulsion, which, despite aesthetic elucidation thanks to Homer’s craft, reveals the pattern of insanity always inherent in unbrokenness. The Homeric warrior, whose pathos of honour easily drives him to overt madness when it is or seems to be violated, always exhibits latent madness that mani fests itself in blood-lust, excessive vengeance, mercilessness and petty quarrels. It is probably this raging of the warrior that gave us the real model for the mythical figure of the petrifying Gorgon which exaggerates it. The distorted face of the warrior, who is screaming and thirsting for bloody slaughter, the gaping mouth and the terrifying eyes heralding death, the flowing hair – all this indicates that the fighter is in the grip of the madness of war, the μένος. This irresistible obsession, beyond consciousness and individuality, has a paralysing, terrifying effect on the opponent.
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SERGIO MORABITO
REMNANT OF THE ASHES, WASTE OF DYING ASPECTS OF MONTEVERDI’S ULYSSES OPERA WHO IS ULYSSES? The piece is about the “ritorno d’Ulisse in patria”, the return or homecoming of Ulysses, starting with his unknowing arrival in Ithaca in his sleep, made possible by the friendly Phaeacians – in Homer, a mysterious people from nowhere who are subjected in the opera to the justice of a grotesque divine tribunal – and leading to the moment when Ulysses reveals himself to his wife Penelope after deceptions, reunions and bloody combats, and Penelope hesitates for an incredibly long time to recognise the man who has become a stranger to her in his twenty years of absence. The title “ritorno in patria” describes in three words the ancient Greek term “nostos”, homecoming. This term was Previous pages: DANIEL JENZ as GIOVE GEORG NIGL as ULISSE ANDREA MASTRONI as NETTUNO
used in the literary discussions of antiquity to summarise books 13-23 of Homer’s Odyssey, which deal with the actual return of the victor of Troy and wanderer. The term is still part of our everyday vocabulary as an element of “nostalgia.” The plural of “nostos” is “nostoi”, used for “sailors’ yarns”, tall tales told by mariners. We follow this ambiguity in the Homeric epic, which offers a wealth of fantastical myths and figures, particularly in the narratives of the wanderings. Which raises the question, how much is true of what “resourceful Ulysses” (perhaps only allegedly castaway, fugitive, captive – the trickster, in short) tells? “Self-preservation is self-denial” is the quintessence of Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of the Odyssey, “one of
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the earliest representative documents of Western civilization”, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment.1 By giving his name as “Noone”, Ulysses tricks Polyphemus, the man-eating Cyclops. When Ulysses burns out his single eye, Polyphemus vainly calls for help from his Cyclops people – “Noone has injured me!” For this deed, Polyphemus’s father, Neptune, god of the sea, will persecute Ulysses inexorably. With each successful stage in the struggle for survival, the identity of the seafarer becomes more insubstantial and fragile. Ulysses actually becomes “Noone”, although not as supposed. In Bertolt Brecht’s stories, he plays a role as “Mr Keuner” (a play on the German keiner, or “no one”) who is not easy to grasp, and in James Joyce’s Ulysses he wanders through Dublin as an advertising salesman. But don’t be deceived by this – the demythologisation of Homer’s epic isn’t a modern phenomenon. At the time the opera was created (its première was in 1640), the literary form of the Homeric epic had – like the heroic nature of its protagonist – came under criticism which was in part harsh and thorough. A criticism that could tie in with ancient authors, which discredited the ruler of Ithaca as a cunning fraud (Pindar) and envious villain (Gorgias), cowardly intriguer (Sophocles) and cruel man of power (Virgil). In the Middle Ages, one looked at Ulysses as clever but ignoble, and at his wanderings as the punishment of a restlessly roaming murderer. The height of this devaluation was finally the relegation to Hell Ulysses suffers in Dante’s Inferno.2 Among the scholars of the Renaissance there were a growing number of voices who no longer acclaimed the
poet of the Odyssey uncritically. Identification with personal national culture, which also derived from the construction of a line of tradition from Troy to Rome, certainly played as much a role as poetological criteria: one particular objection was the lack of unity in the action of the two epics attributed to Homer.3
THE QUEEN’S LAMENT Let us turn to the great monologue by Penelope, waiting in Ithaca for the return of her husband, which follows the allegorical prologue that opens the piece by the poet Giacomo Badoaro. The character places the tirade under an objectifying healing: Di misera regina / non terminati mai dolenti affani. (“Never ending pains of a miserable queen.”4) Two more lines are sufficient to outline the situation: “The awaited one does not return / and the years rush by.” And Penelope continues, “My torments have lasted – alas – too long / time crawls for those who live in anguish.” Time (Tempo) is one of the three Allegories who had harassed la fragilità humana (Human Frailty) in the prologue. There, Time characterised itself in the words chè se ben zoppo / ho l’ali (“though I limp, I have wings”) as an oxymoron capturing the paradoxical and painful situation of the endlessly dragging but irresistible passage of Time. In the next four lines of her monologue, the queen talks of “utterly deceptive hope” and goes on to recapitulate the twenty years before the start of the opera, which she felt trapped in: “two decades have passed / since the unforgettable day when, / through an abduction, the haughty Trojan / plunged his illustrious homeland into ruin.”
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The “haughty Trojan” refers to the Trojan prince Paris, whose abduction of the beautiful Helen, wife of Greek king Menelaus, triggered the clause of the alliance which obliged the Greek princes to take a fleet to besiege Troy. Penelope avoids speaking the names of the adulterous couple, here as everywhere else in the piece. It’s not surprising that she can’t bear to speak the names “Paris” and “Helen”. For her, he is merely il superbo troiano, she is la profuga greca – the “Greek woman who fled”. People are not allowed to utter the two names in her presence – although this is the first thing that her son Telemachus does at the start of the second part of the opera, when he returns from Sparta, where he saw Helen. Not only that. He wounds his mother with an enraptured declaration of love for the very woman whose adultery has also destroyed her (Penelope’s) marriage, and ultimately much of her life. Telemachus sides with Paris in regarding the astounding scale of “collateral damage” in the fallout of Paris’ love – the Trojan war and his mother’s suffering – as more than justified by Helen’s beauty. Penelope begins to bicker with her absent husband. Yes, it was right and proper to pursue the wicked love of Paris and Helen as a delitto di foco (“crime of fire”) by reducing Troy to ashes, “but you, who boasts of punishing adulterers, (…) leave your chaste wife among hostile rivals. / Every departure longingly / awaits a return / you alone have lost your day of returning.” Here, Penelope declaims the subsequently repeated line Tu sol del tuo tornar perdesti il giorno as a painful and accusatory driving chromatically ascending line. Tornare – “to return, come back” – this
brings us to the lexical field which gives the opera its title. Penelope will not leave it now until the end of the monologue. There is an interlude of a declaration of allegiance, in which Ulysses’ old nurse speaks her name. “Unhappy Eurycleia / inconsolable nurse, / share the grief of your beloved queen.” This is the first of her two responses in Penelope’s monologue which leave us wondering whether the queen is aware of her at all. After Tempo (Time) Penelope calls to Fortuna, another of the three alle gories harassing “Human Frailty” in the prologue, the goddess of chance; has she switched her “ever-changing wheel” for a firm base, or is the veil blown by the ever-turning wind only slackened for Penelope? In her monologue, Penelope only omits Love – the third power of fate in the prologue, beside Time and Fortune. She speaks of Love as simply a crime, rather than an allegory. Later she will mock Cupid as idol vano (a vain idol) whose “fickleness is well-fledged.” In the opera, Penelope’s rejection of the suitors is less for fidelity to Ulysses, or because she was insensitive to their pleas, but because of her hurt for her love for him, for fear of being hurt by love again, of being disappointed, cheated. This is another significant change which the authors made in the motivation for her behaviour.
THE TIME OF THE SUBJECT “I make excuses for you,” Penelope says in her imagined debate with Ulysses, “I argue with Fate in your defence,” but it is clear that this defence is the bitterest of all accusations. Her plea is framed by the line torna, deh torna Ulisse (“return,
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ah return, Ulysses”). Eurycleia picks up on the word tornare, and argues “No star can determine a parting without return.” At this point, Penelope’s enhanced recitative blooms into song for the first time, and she seems to be responding to her old servant’s keyword, which was perhaps intended to remind her of the subsequent song: “Calm returns to the sea, / Zephyr returns to the meadow, / the dawn meanwhile sweetly invites the sun / to a return of the day which had departed.” The song goes on to list other comparisons with nature, the rivers returning to the ocean, before her melody fails, and Penelope goes on to describe the soul returning to heaven after a brief sojourn on earth, which leads to the repetitive accusation tu sol del tuo tornar, tu sol del tuo tornar perdesti il giorno (“you alone have lost the day of your return”). Hans-Thies Lehmann, the most influential theatre thinker of recent decades, has shown in his study Theater und Mythos that the tragedies of antiquity do not simply narrate the myths handed down, let alone attest to or even justify these philosophically. Rather, by liberating individual human voices and bodies from the flow of authorial epic narration, tragedy fundamentally questions the myth. The “isolated mortal perspective” is introduced into and contrasted with the vaulting and meaningful time of myth.5 While “for Homer’s world” it was true that “the mortal age was recorded within the era of the gods” the theatre of tragedy introduced “a new time of the subject, entirely focused on the body.”6 This “individual experience of time […] contrasts with the idea of cyclical time
in myth, with the recurring time of the universe, the seasons and the festivals.” 7 This irreversible time of the subject points to death: “Return, for while / you cruelty prolong my pain / I see the hour of my death approaching. / Return, oh return, Ulysses.” These are the closing words of Penelope’s monologue. Homer’s mythical universe was already irrevocably broken by the start of the opera by Monteverdi and Badoara.
THE GODS OF ULYSSES Hegel tackled the question of the Homeric gods in theatre only indirectly and with extreme caution in his Aesthetics.8 Allready for the epic itself Hegel describes the interplay of human and divine motives as a delicate balance. “On the one hand in their content the gods are the personality, the individual passion, the decision and will of man; but on the other hand, the gods are viewed and stressed as existing absolutely, not only independent of the individual subject but as the forces driving and determining him. […] Therefore, the free independence of the gods as well as the freedom of the individual agents is jeopardised. Above all, if the power of command is attributed to the gods, then human independence suffers as a result, while we have stipulated this independence as absolutely and essentially demanded by the Ideal of art. […] For the god commands and man has but to obey. From this external relation between gods and men even great poets have not been able to free themselves.” As an example, Hegel cites Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes, in which only the external pressure exercised by Heracles, appearing as a deus ex machina, forces
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the protagonist to join in the Trojan war. As Hegel puts it, this is “a kind of presentation through which […] the gods become dead machines, and individuals mere instruments of an alien caprice.” Interestingly, he concludes that “such a kind of representation may be allowed to epic long before it can be allowed to drama, because in epic the side of inwardness […] falls into the background, and a wider scope is allowed to the external in general.” Hegel is making an issue here of the theatrical presentation as distinct from the epic – the caesura which happens when the heroic myth is torn from the continuum of the narrative and staged 9: In the Homeric epic, humanity appears in the outer life of their actions, it is only in the tragedy that the human subject (Hegel’s “inner spirit”) experiences itself as and in contradiction to the mythical narrative context. The stage setting distorts and shreds the epic unity of divine and mortal deeds, as god and mortal always appear there as antagonists. In the plays of Aeschylus there is more than one direct mention of “the awareness that the gods use mortals like instruments.” At the latest by Euripides, they have become “the incarnation of envy, hate, jealousy and cruelty.” And “while in the epic the greatness of heroes touched the gods, the theatre emphasises the implacable distance between executioner and victim.”10 Monteverdi’s and Badoaro’s opera certainly seeks to soften and bridge this gap between the remote cosmos of the epic poem and the modern theatre through the Baroque aesthetic of the miraculous, so in the case of the transformations of the protagonist into an old beggar and back to his alleged
true form, achieved partly by simple exits, and partly through the use of trapdoors, accompanied by thunder and lightening. Conversely, and at the same time, this increases the abandonment of their hero to the “dead machines.” Simply compare the protagonist’s “churlish” reaction after the powerful tirade at Minerva’s commands in abito maestro (in masterly garb) in Act II, scene 9: “Man is always blind. / But more blind must he be / who follows divine orders.”11 The scenes with the gods in Ritorno can be read as a reconquista. While Neptune complains to Jupiter in Act I, scene 5 about human freedom (l’humana libertate) which rebels against the gods and fate, the Olympians make Ulysses a campion celeste 12, a heavenly or divine victor who leads back the humanità soggetta 13, vanquished humanity, to service to faith. An example is made of the godless Phaeacians showing that “there will be no homecoming for mortal voyages that go against the will of the gods” 14, Ulysses shows that “no one who has a god as his companion can fail” 15. Badoaro’s libretto is underpinned by linguistic terms and gestures of devotion16 which are far from antiquity, in which the names of the pagan gods are capitalised, an honour actually reserved to the Christian God. We cannot rule out the possibility that the ironic portrayal of the gods is an implicit subversive criticism of the claims to power of orthodox Christianity. Badoaro was a member of the free-thinking Accademia degli Incogniti, Monteverdi even came to the attention of the Inquisition, whose representatives – like the dethroned gods of Euripides – still had power, although no longer dignity. 17
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THE PROLOGUE The Prologue is one of the great unresolved questions about the transmission of the Ulysses opera by Badoaro and Monteverdi. The text of the opening scene in the Viennese copy of the score is not included in any of the twelve libretto copies authenticated to date. In the literary sources we find Fate (il Fato), together with Strength (la Fortezza) and Prudence (la Prudenza). Fate says, “I govern the course of the dark secrets of Heaven according to my will,” and Strength and Prudence second him with the words: “Strength vainly arms himself for victory, / human Prudence is too fragile for victory. / Strength, spirit, boldness avail little, / because whatever Fate opposes is in vain.” Fate then announces to the “Mortals” (the assembled audience): “today you will see how mighty Ulysses / overcomes risks and dangers, the wise goddess [Minerva] assists him / with her counsel, as I intend, / his homeland and his wife finally rejoice, / the unjust suitors lose their life, / Neptune softens and the Achaeans [who wanted to avenge the deaths of the suitors] are banished by fear.” – The whole thing is applauded by Strength and Prudence as “the work of Fate, which loosens every knot”.18 The only preserved musical source chooses an entirely different perspective on the subsequent action. Its focus is no longer on the strong masculine heroes associated with the power of Fate, but on Human Frailty (humana fragilità), which “a puff of wind can fell”, in its exposure to Time, Fortune and Cupid. Staging has experienced with various solutions in casting humana fragilità. In the early phase of rediscovery in
the 20th century, this was identified with Ulysses (which was curiously at odds with the subsequent frequent glorification of the hero) and later also with Penelope (which seems more logical). Mostly the allegorical figure is separately cast, generally along with its tormentors Tempo, Fortuna and Amore. Our staging takes a different tack by assigning the four vocal parts (which in the original were first in the soprano clef, then in the alto and finally in the soprano clef again) to four actors in the subsequent action, namely those which are the most at risk, and actually fall apart in the course of the piece and its treatment of violence. We followed here the literary connotations of the individual counterparts. The oldest and most vulnerable figure, Ulysses’ nurse Ericlea, heads the list, followed by Iro, who takes refuge in suicide from Fortuna’s blows, Melanto, whose lover Eurimachus is murdered by Ulysses, and the lovesick Pisandro, who is also killed by Ulysses. We curtailed the story of the maiden Melanto and the suitor Eurimachus by consolidating Eurimachus with Anfonimo. In the original, the two roles are separated, with Anfonimo one of the chorus of suitors and Eurimachus shown separately in the dramatis personae as “lover of Melanto”, although he very clearly acts as a member of the former group (where he already belongs in Homer). No word or note needs to be changed for this consolidation, the role of Anfonimo simply disappears, appearing only in the list of cast but not in the libretto as sung. We may be forgiven for taking the Prologue (which only appears in the musical version) as authority for our staging, which pursues the
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invalidity of all heroic historiography. When writing this article, it was confirmed three weeks after the start of rehearsals that the most inconsistent, fragile and fractured character is actually the Homeric “incinerator of cities”
himself, “remnant of the ashes, waste of dying”19, in whom Penelope senses a spark of the Ulysses who left her twenty years earlier and was lost in the chaos of the Trojan War.20
1 Theodor W. Adorno / Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment Philosophical Fragments, Los Angeles 1944 / Frankfurt 1969, https://giuseppecapograssi.files.wordpress. com/2013/08/ dialektik_aufklaerung.pdf 2 Citations from: Elisabeth Frenzel, Stoffe der Weltliteratur. Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte, Stuttgart 2005, S. 595f 3 Cf. Hendrik Schulze, Odysseus in Venedig. Sujetwahl und Rollenkonzeption in der venezianischen Oper des 17. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt 2004 4 The act and scene citations for the original five-act version are in accordance with the three-act version of the score. 5 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Theater und Mythos. Die Konstitution des Subjekts im Diskurs der antiken Tragödie, Stuttgart 1991, p. 54 6 ibid., p. 59 7 ibid., p. 60 8 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ästhetik, vol. 1, III. Das Kunstschöne und das Ideal, II. Die Handlung, cited from https://www.textlog.de/5720.html http://www.textlog. de/5720.html 9 Hans-Thies Lehmann, loc. cit., p. 12 10 ibid, p. 74, p. 194, p. 104 11 Sempre è cieco il mortale. Ma allor si dèe più cieco / ch’il precetto divin devoto osserva. / Io ti seguo o Minerva. According to the stage directions, Minerva then actually appears during the massacre “in machina”. 12 III, 7 13 II, 9 14 I, 6 15 Perir non può chi tien per scorta il Cielo, / chi ha per compagno un Dio. (II, 9) 16 To note but a few examples: l’uman peccato (the human sin, I, 5), Questa mia destra humile / o s’arma a tuo conto, o Cielo (My humble right hand, arms itself on your behalf, O heaven!, II, 13), Prega, mortal, deh prega, / chè sdegnato e pregato / un Dio si piega. (a wrathful god can be placated through prayer III, 7) 17 Albrecht Dihle, Griechische Literaturgeschichte, Stuttgart 1967, p. 172 inter al. 18 Translated from: Francesca Zardini / Grazia Zardini Lana, Gli Ulissi di Giacomo Badoaro: albori dell’opera a Venezia, Verona 2007, p. 141 et seq. 19 Quell’Ulisse son io, / delle ceneri avanzo, / residuo delle morti […] (III, 10) 20 Surprising, but logical: in the Italian epic film Ulisse (1954, directed by Mario Camerini), the hero is introduced as suffering from total amnesia and loss of identity.
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TOBIAS DUSCHE
ULYSSES’ GAZE ABOUT THE MANAKI BROTHERS’ FILM FOOTAGE USED IN THE PERFORMANCE
THE ACTIVE GAZE An old woman crouches on the ground in the open air, spinning wool. Her tools are simple, and her work processes have not changed for generations. Nevertheless, this image marks a new chapter in cultural history. It is not a photograph, but a series of photographic images taken in quick succession, which when played back give the impression of natural movement. It is the earliest known film shot in the Balkans. Running just a few seconds long, it shows barely two cycles of a repeating sequence of movements, recorded in 1905. Ninety years later, Theodoros Angelopoulos opens his film Ulysses’ Gaze with this and two other short sequences from the same year; these show a number of women and girls performing various activities to prepare wool for the loom. He has his protagonist say from off-screen: Previous pages: DANIEL JENZ as GIOVE ANA BONDARENKO as GIUNONE
” Weavers in Avdella, a Greek village, in 1905, the first film made by the brothers Miltos and Yannakis Manaki. The first film ever made in Greece and the Balkans. But is that a fact? Is it the first film? The first gaze?” Over a period of sixty years, the Manaki brothers have travelled the Balkans to capture the extraordinary and the everyday in photographs and films, and in doing so they have created an invaluable visual memory. Angelopoulos’ Odysseus, an alter ego of the filmmaker simply called A in the script, sets out to search for the Manaki brothers’ three lost rolls of film which it is said have not yet been developed: another first gaze, burned into a light-sensitive emulsion on a fragile support material. A’s journey through the post-Yugoslavian Balkans ravaged by civil war is arduous and growing steadily more dangerous. It often takes him not only
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through geographical space, but also through time and into the depths of personal and collective memory. The external increasingly becomes an internal journey. What A is looking for is not the document that the film reels promise, but something much more comprehensive: “ And, if the soul is to know itself, it must gaze into the soul!” – Plato, Alcibiades, 133B As the quote at the beginning of the film suggests, it is not just about seeing, but about recognizing. It is about looking into the soul – one’s own soul, that of others, and also into the soul of a cultural group that is tearing itself to pieces in border struggles during the filming of Ulysses’ Gaze. “Every filmmaker remembers the first time he looked through the viewfinder of a camera. It is a moment which is not so much the discovery of cinema but the discovery of the world. But there comes a moment when the filmmaker begins to doubt his own capacity to see things, when he no longer knows if his gaze is right and innocent.” – Theodoros Angelopoulos* The “right gaze” is the one that recognizes. If you lose it, you lose your connection with the world. In this sense, “the first gaze” is a gaze that, from the ruins of the present, sees what is possible, what can be better in the future, despite all injuries and entanglements. As such, it is akin to the gaze of love, which can overcome what seems to be insurmountable. A has lost the “right gaze.” My own first glance. Lost long ago. He becomes ob
sessed with regaining the innocence of the first glance along with the film rolls he is looking for. This alone contains the hope that present horrors can be overcome, and wounds can be healed. That it could be useful to take up the thread again, to attach it to what has been torn off and continue to spin life. The Weavers. It is surely no coincidence that so many linguistic turns of phrase are borrowed from the practice of creating textile fabrics. Perhaps they correspond to the individual’s experience of being part of smaller and larger communities. Baba Despina (Grandmother Despina) is the name of the Manaki brothers’ first known film. Their grandmother, whom they filmed spinning, is said to have been 114 or even 117 years old, and she is still actively involved in the economic community. In the film Chores (The Weavers) we also see old women who work just as much as younger women. And the youngest of them watch and learn: life is about being interwoven. The experience of these practical activities may make it easier to create individual connections without despairing of the bigger picture. After all, looking at the detail takes an active gaze. Watching the horrors of the world as they occur yet not doing anything is difficult to bear. In the Manaki brothers’ films, the activity of weaving itself is not seen, perhaps because it took place indoors where there was not enough light for the camera. But when we project the images of spinning on the stage onto the woollen threads that are stretched across the loom that Penelope is work ing on, the different activities seem to come together; Penelope seems to be working hand in hand with an active,
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surviving woman whose life spans four generations.
SOMETHING IS COMING TO AN END, SOMETHING IS CONTINUING The North Macedonian Cinematheque has provided us with historical footage of excellent quality. This makes it possible to extract details from the films or to follow individual people at work. We see looks and facial expressions that show that the people being filmed are fully aware of the camera. The image looks back. For a moment, all distance seems non-existent. Those who can see are looked at and recognized as seeing. In the stage design, Penelope’s loom becomes a cinema, And the images projected onto the screen – the woollen threads – become a counterpart for the weaver. A place of reflection or of silent dialogue with the tireless working women that the Manaki brothers have captured on film. A’s journey also ends in a cinema. He (like Angelopoulos) found the film rolls he was looking for in besieged Sa-
rajevo. And (unlike Angelopoulos) he found someone who could develop the films. But this man and his family die in sniper fire. Now A is sitting in a bombed-out cinema; a blank film flickers on the screen and is reflected in his eyes. We don’t know whether this is the film he was looking for, whether some thing went wrong during development, whether the exposed material has decomposed over the years? Or is it just the idle apparatus that, in the light of the lamp, casts shadows of its moving parts onto the screen, like floaters or after-images on the retina? (The smallest and at the same time largest cinema is the eye itself.) The undefined flickering can be an end or a beginning. The white sheet, the empty screen. A first gaze. An empty space can be defined. A/Odysseus imagines his return home in the cinema. Future rehearsals will show how Penelope returns from the dialogues with the film-like shadows. * Horton, Andrew, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation; Princeton University Press 1997, S. 185
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GEORG NIGL as ULISSE HELENE SCHNEIDERMAN as ERICLEA
Previous pages: KATE LINDSEY as PENELOPE GEORG NIGL as ULISSE
IMPRINT CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI
IL RITORNO D’ULISSE IN PATRIA SEASON 2024/25 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 22 NOVEMBER 2024 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editors SERGIO MORABITO & ADELE BERNHARD based on the program booklet of the Vienna State Opera for the première of the 2024 production Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT & IMAGE REFERENCES All texts were taken from the Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria programme of the Vienna State Opera, 2024. IMAGE REFERENCES Cover image: Fiona Tan – All performance fotos: Michael Pöhn / Wiener Staatsoper GmbH. ENGLISH TRANSLATION Andrew Smith. Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.
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