The multi-year project of reading and rewriting Verdi's works for sounds and images through reworkings by contemporary musicians involves the sound reworking of the Quattro Pezzi sacri in 2017. The real meeting between Verdi and Dante takes place with the Laudi alla Vergine Maria, from the last canto of Paradiso, included in the Quattro Pezzi sacri (1898).
The multi-year project of reading and rewriting Verdi's works for sounds and images through reworkings by contemporary musicians involves the sound reworking of the Four Sacred Pieces in 2017. The real meeting between Verdi and Dante takes place with the Laudi alla Vergine Maria, from the last canto of Paradiso, included in the Four Sacred Pieces (1898).
They are for female voices without accompaniment: the holy prayer of St. Bernardo is tuned to it with pure sonic transparency, according to that chaste sobriety of classical polyphony that the late Verdi pointed out as a goal to Italian music, teaching by example how one could really “progress by returning to the ancient”. Conceived and composed by Verdi each independently of the others over a period of ten years, the Four Sacred Pieces were published in 1898, a few years before the Maestro's death (1901). At first they were not intended for diffusion, but at the behest of Verdi himself, the last three, namely Laudi alla Vergine Maria, Te Deum and Stabat Mater (1895-96), saw a first public performance in Paris in 1898.
But Verdi does not attend: two years earlier Giuseppina Strepponi had died and the now old Maestro from Busseto does not feel able to face the long journey and the great effort of execution and direction. It is Arrigo Boito who takes care of the preparation of the concert and takes Verdi's place. The only one of the Four Sacred Pieces that is not performed at the Parisian premiere is the Ave Maria. Due to its origin it has very few things in common with the other pieces, except for the sacred text. The composition of this is produced by Verdi as a pure exercise in counterpoint. Verdi accepts the challenge and Boito takes care of the lyrics. The location of the Four Sacred Pieces autograph is unknown to this day.
Of the Four Sacred Pieces, three are dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The female figure in Verdi melodrama represents salvation, innocence. Violetta, the two Leonoras, Aida, Amneris, Desdemona. In the spiritual madrigal of the Laudi, every word of Dante becomes a musical image and again Das Ewig-Weibliche, the eternal Gretchen feminine of Faust, becomes redemption. In our Paradise, only two male figures act among a female multitude: Dante and Saint Bernard. But the Paradise they inhabit is only of the woman, only through her body can one live, not see, the Light.
The water flows into the bridge like amniotic sac water that contains the living being. Benedictus fructus ventris tui_ In the evident biological impossibility of conception embodied by our Mary, curved by the weight of the years and by the chorus of elderly women, the philosophical nature of motherhood is manifested: the tension to become two, to transform into new, into something else, into unknown. Bodies, voices, thoughts inside soft envelopes lying on the ground to outline minimal boundaries, to protect faceless identities. Individual voices evaporate from the bags and in the air they touch, add, overlap.
In elevation and discovery they recognize each other, one after the other, they become in the sum choir, the unique voice of singing voices. Je vous salue, Marie!, was the title of Jean-Luc Godard in the film work of 1984. Hail Mary! The mystery is already inside the great “water bag”, it is already in motion for the rise from the ground towards the sky, the great body of bodies moves vertically, the ascent into the dark night begins towards ecstasy, and then the Light.
In the thirty-third canto of the third of the three Canticles, the Trinity as a gravitational black hole, now having reached collapse, swallows the universe of triplets and previous encounters. The hendecasyllables become worlds, planets, stars and galaxies and everything explodes in the sphere of Light as the most powerful of the Supernovae.
At the limit of reality, at the limit and beyond language.
And there is no more speech, only song, vision, pure intuition, abandonment, silence. The image of the blessed unborn child, in his likeness, the reflection and nostalgia of returning to being a Person bursts upon Dante/Paolo. The glass and steel monument, a cumbersome testimony of the human limit, is inhabited by a multitude of different spirits, of unlimited desire to tend upwards, beyond the limit of the space/time of the Laudi, beyond the music of the Master, beyond the language that still confines them in a timeless representation, between flashes of images of water, rotating spheres and divine advent.
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