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Lohengrin

Invisible narrative for a singer, instruments and voices Libretto by Salvatore Sciarrino after Jules Laforgue’s tale of the same name

Premiere 28. April 2017

Performed in Italian with German supertitles

Piece-Info

Lohengrin has left Elsa. Not, as in Wagner’s poignant version, because she could not resist asking his true name, but in banal yet devastating fashion: During the wedding night he found himself left cold by this dreamily naïve girl. Now he has disappeared. All that remains is a white down pillow as a taunting reminder of the swan knight, and a frantic, indeed schizophrenic young woman, desperately trying to overcome the trauma of that night.

In fact, Wagner’s heroic drama was not the inspiration for this 50-minute chamber opera created by Sicilian avant-garde composer Salvatore Sciarrino in 1982 for a soprano and 17 musicians, but rather the short tale from the collection »Moralités légendaires« by the French poet Jules Laforgue, written at the end of the 19th century. Sciarrino turned this subtle psychological study into a soundscape of Elsa’s utterances, her voice rising above the orchestral murmurings. The abandoned girl is plagued by febrile memories and visions, whilst the instrumental shrieking pierces her soul. At the end there is no cathartic explosion of despair and salvation, but rather a desperate morass of dreamlike images. In this work, clearly influenced by the psychoanalytic thinking that was just emerging at the end of the 19th century, Sciarrino, one of the most important and most frequently performed contemporary composers, has developed a (tonally) expressive »anti-Lohengrin«.

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