Inferno

The main theme of 'opera is Dante's self-portrait emerging from Hell, a Dante with eyes blinded by rage, flooded with blood, a merciless Dante who condemns without reticence or remorse.

This literary anger is so strongly affected by Dante's real discontent with the injustices he suffered, with the "no life" to to which exile condemned him, that it becomes a direct expression of his existential experience. Exile in the Middle Ages is like death, a social death that is worse than bodily death. Without corporation, without family, without faction, in the Middle Ages a man is virtually dead. The Inferno fully expresses the Urschrei launched from Dante, despair over one's loneliness and helplessness.

The Florence depicted from Dante is a city dominated by the energy of the newly emerging bourgeois class, its progressive emancipation from the nobility and clergy. The city is teeming with thieves, prostitutes, merchants, corrupt and treacherous priests, with their eccentricities, superstitions, idiosyncrasies, but also with their ingenuity, operativeness and ambition. It is a carnival where an intellectual as morally upright and devoted to justice as Dante feels lost and misunderstood. Like the Baruch Spinoza of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Dante obsessively observes the myriad Florentines in motion, doomed by their own finiteness and the superficiality of their pursuit of wealth.

Dante, the protagonist and creator of his stage space is played from an actor who narrates, narrates, reveals buried personalities and fragments of landscape during his gradual progress, in continuous movement from the earth's surface to the deep center created by Lucifer's fall.

He is accompanied from a vocal quartet that represents in madrigal form the plot of his doubts, fears, and reflections, using descriptive and self-analytical fragments of the text. The vocal quartet creates an aura of sound around the voice of the actor intended to include the character of Virgil as a guide and source of reflection for Dante.

Dante expresses himself in a lucid and expressive language, according to a complex poetic structure that is always conceived in the form of communication and reportage, critical speculation of infernal experience, while Lucifer, stuck in the frozen lake of Cocito is the antithesis of communication, stuck in cryptic silence. The deep bass playing him generates a continuous and metamorphic melody, accompanied by the string quartet, an acoustic representation of the frozen lake. His grumbling and wailing resonate in all the circles of Hell, they are the Leçon de ténèbres imparted to all the damned, from below, the most remote and dangerous place where the worst of all times lodge.

Lucifer's last solo, a representation of the entropy of the entire created world from Dante, will be composed on an original text by Tiziano Scarpa, with a free dramatic language that summarizes, fragments and grinds into a verbal dust the richness and diversity of the creatures created from Dante.

The empathy expressed from Dante toward some sinners, transforms them into modern, present-day presences, leaving us to admire their features and stories in a kind of suspension of judgment, a moral vacuum that seems to evolve into doubt, an instance of innocence, interrupting the eternal process of damnation. The dialogue with Dante represents a moment of difficult, painful and sincere reflection for such complex characters as Francesca, Pier delle Vigne, Brunetto Latini, Ugolino and Ulysses. The violence of other presences in dialogue with Dante, examples of which are Filippo Argenti, Alessio Interminei and Vanni Fucci, amplifies the dramaturgical registers and offers us the chance to get to know Dante as a person and in the role of a future condemned man. The guardians of the various hellish thresholds of passage, such as Minos or Charon, interact with Dante from the height of their mythological history and decision-making charisma.

The landscape painted from Dante along the downward spiral of his Inferno is fantastical and apocalyptic, from the vision of the Dark Wilderness where he is lost, to the Underground City of Dis, the infernal rivers Acheron and Styx, the Malebolge, and the frozen lake Cocito, deserts, lagoons, earthquakes, and underground volcanic eruptions, alternating to flashbacks of prosperous and beautiful medieval Florence, teeming with life and tension.

Lucia Ronchetti