Creation of the Teatro Regio di Parma for the 2026 Verdi Festival
Dramatic exfiltrations from the lyric drama in four parts with a libretto by Temistocle Solera, from the drama Nabuchodonosor by Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and Francis Cornu.
Dramaturgy, imagoturgy_Francesco Pititto
Composition, installation, costumes_Maria Federica Maestri
Sounds_Andrea Azzali
Music consulting_Adriano Engelbrecht, Lorenzo Marchi, Victoria Vasquez Jurado
Performer_n. 20 performers with physical disabilities
n. 30 children_adolescents of the Children's Choir of the Teatro Regio in Parma
Entering a space/time, that immanent world of creation home to every versificatory possibility or intuition, triggered, ignited by the imaginative process, and then made real, whose path is marked by “going back, taking up something that is in the poetic past and re-proposing it, finding new words to say it”, to sing it together, a chorality of singularities in which each inhabits his own past and builds his present as already experienced, in nostalgia for places, sounds and silences, in his own internal and external homeland.
Me in the middle of the chorus, a solitary corporeal verse, a decasyllable of the only Poetry that holds us together, that makes us equal before the divine. At a certain point in our lives we live in the space of the past, that is, memory becomes a place to be inhabited in a physical sense, of which we are prisoners because that is precisely where we continue to live. A prison of memories.
If time becomes body exile is in the memory of a mutilated body. The subtraction Hannah Arendt writes about for those who suffer exile, all kinds of exile.
A body that has been battered, mortified, modified in physical form and soul. Like a chorus of vanquished and exiled, always landless wayfarers scattered throughout the world.
But before, the earth was there, with its places, the scents and the people known, the lives lived.
The space of memory is an oppressed homeland and a cage of redemption, the present demands justice for the injustice of a life that mortifies what has been, the time lost and never found but always alive in every gesture, in every distorted language, in every landscape encountered and never left.
“Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate; Va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli, Ove olezzano tepide e molli L’aure dolci del suolo natal! Del Giordano le rive saluta, Di Sionne le torri atterrate… Oh, mia patria si bella e perduta! O membranza sì cara e fatal! Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati, Perché muta dal salice pendi? Le memorie nel petto raccendi, Ci favella del tempo che fu! O simile dei Solima ai fati Traggi un suono di crudo lamento, O, t’ispiri il Signore un concento Che ne infonda al patire virtù.”
A short hymn – 16 decasyllables divided into 4 quatrains, with accents on 3-6-9 syllables - which sucks in the events of the opera, the stories of the protagonists and the jealousies, violence, follies and all encloses and protects them, shocks and embraces them, transporting them to the space/time of reality.
That final concentus calls to action no longer to repeated lamentation, to act with the body so that it finds its virtues now and here.
A single large body from which limbs have been removed, wounds inflicted, hopes of returning to how it was before, to the time of youth and the unlimited force of perspective, to one's own land and language or dialect, to perfumes and flavors, to loves, a mutilated body that continues to scream verses, creating each time, for that space/time, one's own experience and the present together.
As if they were_The banks of the Euphrates_A river of human bodies squeezed between the two wall banks of the transept of an old hospital, chained to their prostheses, like towers torn down by the catastrophe of life. The wounded body is lost forever, but the memory of time gone by rekindles the meaning of one's existence even in the time of disaster - through misfortune of birth, of news, of history.
The sound is raw, unripe, distorted, immature, childish, but from faint, uncertain, stumbling it becomes a choral lament, the voice of the voices of broken, forgotten humanity.
An invisible and silent humanity inhabiting the separate places: hospitals, tent cities, retirement homes, underground shelters, prisons, orphanages.
The humanity we do not want to look at because it testifies to our inability to demand justice, fairness, love for the Other, the Other who no longer seems even entitled to lament. The Other who in this Nabucco of ours, will whisper, murmur, shout, sing, beyond the notes, his right to life, dignity, happiness.