Setting dramaturgical and performance sequences, sound and visual installations in spaces that are still empty but filled with signs of past functions, means emphasizing the historical and social importance, a link between past, present, and future, and ongoing works of urban, cultural, and civil transformation.
The gardens, corridors, and prison rooms of the Napoleonic side resonate with echoes of tears, cries, prayers, and guilt, strongly related to the choral lament that accompanies the auto-da-fé ceremony.
The temporary installation in the still empty spaces to be renovated will bring, through an artistic function, the historical and social memory of these environments of punishment and suffering back to contemporary life. At the same time, by placing it in a thematic context such as Don Carlo, the drama of the melodramatic sequence under examination can be experienced firsthand by the participating audience.
“LA NATURA E L’AMOR TACER POTRANNO IN ME? TUTTO TACER DOVRA’ PER ESALTAR LA FÈ”
In the great scene of the duet between Philip II, one of the most complex figures in Verdi's opera, and the monumental blind Grand Inquisitor, the reasons of the Church prevail over reason of state: Verdi's anticlerical empathy during the composition of this duet is so intense that it creates one of the highest dramatic scenes in the entire history of opera. Scene perhaps designed for his King Lear, never written but always loved, so precise in its dramatic and musical character that it rises above the historical context of “Don Carlos”.
Verdi manages, through music and dramaturgy, to make the protagonists of this duet on a par with the great Shakespearean figures, such as Lear.
Just as the moor and the storm clothed the betrayed old King, the Auto-da-fé depicted in the square of Valladolid Cathedral becomes the architecture of the clash of powers on the field. The dynamics of the duet, the passing choirs, the voice from heaven all make the scenic-musical movement unique, a disruptive force that tends to expand the time that the writing allocates to this scene. It is on this sensation of space-time explosion that our act of faith is born: a former Napoleonic prison as a royal theatre for the Choir, King and Grand Inquisitor, heretics, Elizabeth, Don Carlo and Rodrigo.
Inquisition derives from the Latin verb inquirere, which means to investigate, to investigate, and finally to search. We sought a place that could be imbued with history and human suffering, voices and laments penetrated the walls and resonant as echoes, suitable for the multiplication of fragments sung as vocal returns from the entire work, of choirs sung by choristers confined in cells, visited by itinerant spectators like the people of a modern auto-da-fé, acted by actor's bodies pronouncing cunning for confessions to extort, mirrored by an imagoturgy that, as in a crystal ball, it could bring together the present and the past as in a garden of laments with, superimposed, a Garden of Delights.
To seek, therefore, in this “parallel” dimension of the Verdi sequence its contemporary refraction, a progressive spatial, temporal, chromatic and musical expansion.
By investigating the centuries-old history of the Inquisition, dramaturgical research has redefined new visual, compositional, and, of course, musical paths, uncovering new sonic textures and scenic scripts, and embracing in depth in the excavation every artistic impulse deriving from the work itself, steeped in great questions, and every visual stimulus from the historical documentation of its terrifying contexts.
The Inquisition court conducted investigations to establish heresy and attempt by all means to convince the alleged heretic to recant. At first, we investigated those who had distanced themselves from the Catholic faith, then we began to associate them with witchcraft and witches, and from preaching, we moved on to persecution, with trials, torture, hangings, and sentences at the stake, against all deviants, the diverse, and above all against women, considered inferior, fearsome creatures, allied with the devil, lying, with insatiable sexual appetites.
In the twentieth canto of Hell, in the fourth pit of the eighth circle:
“Vedi le triste che lasciaron l’ago, la spuola e ‘l fuso, e fecesi ‘ndivine;/fecer malie con erbe e con imago.”
Dante also placed the sorceresses, the cursed females who, instead of dedicating themselves to the spindle and the plume, left the feminine exercises of sewing, weaving and spinning to make ailments with herbal juices and wax images, in which to stick pins.
