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64

Inferno

Opera-film

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Sunday
11
July
2021
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15:00
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Cinema

Synopsis

In June 2021, the world premiere ofopera Inferno, written by Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti on commission from Oper und Schauspiel Frankfurt and based on from Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, will be staged in concert form.

Initially intended to be included in the theatrical staging ofopera, a vast archive of footage featuring singers and actors was produced by director Kay Voges and her team. Following the suspension of the show to due to the ongoing health emergency, the film footage is used to make anopera-film based on Lucia Ronchetti's score and presented at the Spoleto Festival.

The film combines verses from Dante's Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy sung and spoken in Italian and German, Lucia Ronchetti's evocative music, performed from a brass and percussion ensemble, a string quartet and a choral ensemble, and a sequence of video scenes evocative of Dante's vision of the afterlife, footage from the musical performance and images from the 1911 silent film Inferno by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe De Liguoro.

Credits

Program

THE FILM CONTAINS IMAGES THAT MIGHT SHOCK THE VIEWER'S SENSIBILITIES.

OPERA-FILMS OF

Kay Voges and Marcus Lobbes

MUSIC BY.

Lucia Ronchetti

excerpt from Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy in German and Italian

with

Dante Sebastian Kuschmann

inner voice of Dante Jan Jakub Monowid, Matthew Swensen

Frederic Mörth, Eric Ander

Francesca Karolina Makuła

Ulysses Alexander Kravets

Lucifer Alfred Reiter, Matthew Swensen, Frederic Mörth

damned souls Frank Albrecht, Rolf Drexler, Andreas Gießer Anna Kubin, Florian Mania, Andreas Vögler and others

Vocal ensemble, Schumann String Quartet,

Opern- und Museumsorchester Frankfurt am Main

DIRECTOR

Titus Ceccherini

DIRECTOR

Kay Voges and Marcus Lobbes

SCENE

Pia Mackert

COSTUMES

Mona Ulrich

VIDEO ART.

Robi Voigt

LIGHTING, CINEMATOGRAPHER

Voxi Bärenklau

camcorder Jan Isaak Voges

editing Andrea Schumacher

dramaturgy Konrad Kuhn, Ursula Thinnes, Katja Herlemann

With the support of Aventis Foundation and Patronatsverein Frankfurt am Main and the support of Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung

Hall Program

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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

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Dates & Tickets

TICKETING INFO
Sun
11
Jul
2021
at
15:00
San Simone
at
San Simone
at
San Simone
at
San Simone
at
San Simone
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San Simone
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San Simone
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San Simone
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San Simone
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San Simone
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San Simone
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San Simone
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San Simone
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San Simone
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San Simone
Event Times
June 28
11:00
12:00
13:00
14:15
15:15
16:30
17:30
18:30
19:45
20:45
June 29
11:00
12:00
13:00
14:15
15:15
16:30
17:30
18:30
19:45
20:45
June 30
11:00
12:00
13:00
14:15
15:15
16:30
17:30
18:30
19:45
01 July
10:00
11:00
12:00
13:15
14:15
15:30
16:30
17:45
20:30
21:30
02 July
10:00
11:00
12:00
13:15
14:15
17:30
18:30
19:45
20:45
21:45
04 July
11:00
12:00
13:00
14:15
15:15
16:30
17:30
18:30
19:45
20:45
05 July
11:00
12:00
13:00
14:15
15:15
16:30
17:30
18:30
19:45
20:45
06 July
11:00
12:00
13:00
14:15
15:15
16:30
17:30
18:30
19:45
20:45
07 July
11:00
12:00
13:00
14:15
15:15
16:30
17:30
18:30
19:45
20:45
08 July
10:00
11:00
12:00
13:00
14:15
15:15
16:30
17:30
18:30
20:45
21:45
09 July
10:00
11:00
12:00
13:00
14:15
17:30
18:30
19:45
20:45
21:45

Playlist

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Biographies

Lucia Ronchetti

Born to Rome in 1963, Lucia Ronchetti studied composition and electronic music at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome and graduated in History of Music from La Sapienza University in Rome. to Paris, to starting in 1994, she studied with Gérard Grisey, attended the Ircam Annual Course and discussed a doctoral thesis in musicology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sorbonne, under the direction of Prof. François Lesure. In 2005, she was a Visiting Scholar (Fulbright fellow) at Columbia University in New York, at the invitation of Tristan Murail. In 2021 Oper Frankfurt will produce the new opera Inferno, conducted from Tito Ceccherini. The world premiere ofopera from chamber Pinocchios Abenteuer will be presented by Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin, directed by Swaantje Lena Kleff. An additional new production ofopera from camera Pinocchios Abenteuer will be staged by Oper Frankfurt. A new opera will debut at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in operas in Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Bonn and Dortmund to November 2021. In 2020-21 Lucia Ronchetti will be Professor of Composition at the Ferienkurse in Darmastadt and Invited Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt. From 1991 to 1995 Lucia Ronchetti was artistic director of the Animated Festival as part of Hall1 in collaboration with curator Mary Angela Schroth. From 2021 to 2024 she will be the new artistic director of the Venice Music Biennale. Tiziano Scarpa, Ermanno Cavazzoni, IvanVladislavic, Eugene Ostashevsky, Katja Petrowskaja, Iso Camartin and Toti Scialoja have written original texts for her Opere and Action concert pieces.

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