The Betrothed

Ten years after the first stage draft of The Betrothed, Manzoni's work still represents a powerful literary device for investigating the archetypes of Italian culture and, in particular, the founding elements of the language understood not only as writing/reading but as a great fresco including multiple data on thought, aesthetics, vocality, behavior, the vision of the world that concerns - precisely as cultural genetic imprinting - the contemporaneity of Italian society.

Starting from the classics to interpret today from a total artistic point of view –dramaturgical, imagoturgical, installation/scenographic, plastic, musical and poetic – is the characteristic feature of Lenz's research. After multi-year projects on German Romanticism – Lenz, Büchner, Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist – and on Spanish and English Baroque – Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare – Italian Romanticism in its greatest representative seemed a natural acquisition of a strong element of creative investigation. All the more so since the thematic elements of the work could be positive impulses for the artistic hypersensitivity that distinguishes actors and actresses endowed with particular psychic-intellectual status.

And the selection of moods, memories of lived life, emotional conditions and concepts were the references for the first approaches to the narrative references of the work and their dramatic reworking. Oppression, threat, strength, weakness, violence, rejection, resistance, disobedience, cowardice, desire, revulsion, deception, oppression, submission, arbitrariness, hope, guilt, confession, illness, suffering, atonement, and many other constituent segments of the lives of both literary characters and, above all, creative subjects in the field have allowed a series of “refractions” from opera/novel to opera/theatre.

Started with a series of voice and noise recordings (in the bruitistic or noise music mode) of the different moods, emotional and sentimental, the research then continued with the conception of a scenographic/installation habitat composed of six large rooms equipped with transparent walls and colored windows, like the large windows of medieval basilicas: “the Land of Bright Rooms”.

The recited/recorded text is a composition of original fragments, poetic dissertations, reworkings filtered by different memories, substrates of life episodes actually experienced or imagined, a polyphonic concert of metaphysical and metapsychological dialogues but continually returning and again leaving the main lane of the reference original textual.

The multiplication of characters – two Lucias, three nuns of Monza (child-woman-old) – the schizophrenic fusion with timbral alteration in a single actor of the Unnamed and Cardinal Borromeo, the arbitrary attachment of the death of Don Rodrigo taken up by Fermo and Lucia, the choreographic tremor of Don Abbondio and his questioning of physical love, they are some of the most significant metalinguistic passages granted by a dramaturgy as free as a Shakespearean blank verse.

The aesthetics of the image of The Betrothed is as always in Lenz dramaturgy of matter, in this case the masterpiece of Italian literature is broken down into twenty-four performative and visual paintings installed inside an incubator space: each room delimited by light and translucent walls with mobile, elongated images, as in Gothic stained glass windows, and the sound composed of music, voices and sounds that flow everywhere, enveloping performers and spectators together in a common destiny.

The spectator's vision is free and itinerant in “the Land of Bright Rooms” with an invitation to rest on the beds where the actors and actresses acted in the 2013 performance, to take their place in a symbolic exchange of dramaturgical functions and existential hybridizations.

Sacred music and dramaturgical novels are intertwined in the reconstructions of truly lived lives, Manzoni and Verdi characters overlap and merge between lost identities and reconstructed on a personal plot that finds common paths, identical epiphanies and equal suffering in a single great fresco of truth and representation.

Dedicated to Manzoni, it is the requiem for all men who have believed, hoped, fought, the requiem for an ideal that reality seems to reject or forget. A meditation on death in which the theme often addressed in theatrical fiction becomes universal.

In the repose of death comes the last character of the tragedy: «the Verdi Man, with his uncompromising morality, with his betrayed aspirations, conquered and yet superior to the world.».

The taking possession of Manzoni's characters by these “magnificent humble” becomes a contemporary bread revolt and rebellion against oblivion, a beneficial pestilence that forces the disease of equality and the mercy of the tragic actor, of uncompromising morality like Verdi's man.

Aesthetics of the image

In vitro bodies, self-propelled, smiling like unborn babies forced by history, by the history of their little big stories, of each one, of the spouses promised from the first cry, noises and sounds of future neighbors full of effort, fear, redemption. Shiny bodies, squeezed into narrow spaces by the frames, the boundaries, verticals of black walls of anxiety, of anguish, of defeat. Elongated bodies, from bottom to top, figures “similarly different” to those of Doménikos Theotokópoulos (El Greco), Giacometti, Modigliani, simple and sacred at the same time. Like stained glass windows of large basilicas pulsate chromatically in every room, glassy rocks from the volcanoes of the ego.

Test tubes, vertical ampoules, natural habitats for already living fetuses, each protagonists of physiological, physical, scientific and psychiatric monologues. The margin around, in shadow, the emotions, reactions, feelings, imitations, memories and memories, fables and true stories, fictions and truths faded by time, wrinkles, ruts of life, nicotine tattoos exposed in the epiphany of bodies.

The farewell to the mountains, the farewell of everyone to their usual home, to the landscape painted on their eyes, refuges of safe, comforting, simple and benign spaces. Imprinted images, farewell and then the way opens to the life that remains, to the passing of time, to twisted thinking, to the blurred picture, to space without mental and rational space, without reason. This marriage does not have to be done, but it will be done, the merciful conjunction will be fulfilled between the rebirth of the simple and its tremendous complexity. Bodies move, spin, float in the picture frame, the dark space on the right and left presses them in the center but offers them protection as they open up to the unknown. It is up to the sensitive actor who generated them, on this side of the virtual, to call them back to life, to the suspended and limited time of theatrical existence.

Alessandro Manzoni and Giuseppe Verdi

Passion requiem

On 22 May 1873, at the age of eighty-eight, Alessandro Manzoni died in Milan. Verdi does not attend the funeral on May 29 but writes to Clara Maffei on the same day:

«I was not present at the funeral, but few will have been sadder and more moved this morning than I was, although far away. Now it's all over! And with Him ends the purest, the holiest, the highest of our glories. I have read many newspapers. Nobody talks about it as they should. Many words but not deeply felt. However, there is no shortage of bites. Even to Him!... Oh the ugly race we are!» A few days later he offers to «set a dead Mass to music».

Dedicated to Manzoni, it is the Requiem for all men who have believed, hoped, fought, the requiem for an ideal that reality seems to reject or forget. A meditation on death in which the theme often addressed in theatrical fiction becomes universal. In the repose of death comes the last character of the tragedy: «the Verdi Man, with his uncompromising morality, with his betrayed aspirations, conquered and yet superior to the world.»

Like a great fresco of the ideals of a lifetime, Verdi proposes his unshakable vision of the world. Death, as Mila writes, had always been present in his works: «It is a kind of iron of the dramatic profession, an inevitable natural event which, as necessary deus ex machina, comes to cut the knots and resolve the intricate situations in which all men have chased themselves as a result of their passions.»

Andrea Azzali's musical research is carried out on Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem. The working method developed on two different procedures that lead to a single result: the re-dramatization of the Requiem within the dramaturgy of The Betrothed.

Specifically, the song Lacrymosa generates two different textures, the original sound is fragmented and captured in a space-time microstructure superimposed on other microstructures which together generate a dense sound magma.

The second, more traditional method leads to a rewriting of the original score in its first twelve bars re-assembled in a new element which refers to a memory-oblivion of the original structure.

The continuous reference runs hand in hand with the development of theatrical sequences that outline the new narrative/sign writing on the double track of sensitive character-actor.