Artist

Admin

Stage director

Virginia Guastella

Conductor

Giuseppe Prete

Set designer

Domenico Franchi

Costume designer

Fondazione Cantiere Internazionale d'arte di Montepulciano

DAMS Lab / La Soffitta - Università di Bologna

L'ombra di un meriggio lontano

Producer

Bologna

Italy

Public

Private

Approved

"The shadow of a distant noon" symbolically runs through the poetics of Amelia Rosselli, whose first poems from "Variazioni belliche" were published in 1963, at the suggestion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, in "Menabò", a magazine directed by Italo Calvino.
Amelia Rosselli, daughter of Carlo Rosselli, killed at the hands of the Fascists, was a poet, translator, musical composition scholar, ethnomusicologist, organist.
She committed suicide in 1996, she was a voice out of the declared experimentalisms of her coeval, original and unique in the way in which she converted her art and her personal history into an idea of ​​poetry as a private language, which feeds on a pre-creative -rational not entirely designed. For her, art was a matter of liberation, not of reflection.
A condition of perennial trauma, his, for which poetry was a means of reconstructing reality, but always on the basis of a sort of hallucination. The hallucination of pain for the loss first of his father brutally killed, then of his love for him the poet Rocco Scotellaro. The hallucination that led her to embark on a journey of Jungian psychoanalysis and which made her undergo electroshock sessions, reproposed within Guastella's work to underline the brutal consequences experienced by war victims.
A constant fight against death for which even the yearning for God was an anxiety to die. Amelia was and is a daughter of the Second World War. For this reason, the opera opens with a lullaby in French, the only original text written by Guastella, dedicated to Amelia and all the child victims of war. “You, child of war. Vous, enfants de la guerre”.
Amelia loved to call herself "stateless" and not "cosmopolitan", a term used for her by Pasolini. You often said in some interviews that the cosmopolitan is whoever chooses to be, the stateless person is not. This condition of hers is also reflected in the use she made of the three languages, Italian, English and French, and which have been adopted for the libretto.
Dante Alighieri and Franz Kafka were two important inspirations for Rosselli, together with Pasolini. Dante's verses, from Canto XXI, here primarily reproduce the hell of the devils rather than that of the damned with a direct inspiration to the way they are described in popular tradition or as quarrelsome, violent, animalistic, ambiguous. Dante's Inferno is a symbolic representation of the traumatic condition experienced by Amelia Rosselli.
The female voice is Amelia herself, who at times becomes Dante, when with Virgil she walks through one of the circles of hell, which for Amelia becomes a symbolic representation of her state of trauma. The male voice represents a generic "You", which, depending on the narrative moments, becomes Virgil, Rocco Scotellaro, Carlo Rosselli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, God, the outside world, all those who have been the recipients and protagonists of Rosselli's verses throughout its production.

English

L'ombra di un meriggio lontano by Guastella, From (2022/2022), Directed by Virginia Guastella,, Conductor Giuseppe Prete

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