Lucia
Ronchetti

PRESENTATION
Chronicles of loneliness is a dramaturgical studio on the solitude and social isolation of the young people, starting from the reflections and testimonies written by Giacomo Leopardi in his notebooks known as Zibaldone di pensieri.
The voice of Leopardi is represented by every singer on stage, intersected by the various choral unities. They are a multitude of solos and soloists, each one with his own vocal identity. Leopardi is represented as a Hikikomori of the past reflecting on his existential experience in a philosophical and poetical reportage, looking though his Recanati’s window as a screen.
The multitude of performers and players on stage will be portrayed in different attitudes, from the awaking to the sleep, sketching out different days of feverish solitude. They will be immersed in their own reflections, surrounded by the sounds of urban or natural locations, sound-landscapes summoned by the choral ensemble as tutti. According to the Zibaldone, sleep is a magical moment. It reminds of a momentary death, saving from the troubles of life, repairing its damages.
The singers as vocal ensemble and choral ensemble, realize a wide sound-landscape in continuous mutation, animated by short events representing the inner activity of reflection and meditation: the social withdrawal and silence chosen by many young people. They express their feeling through Leopardi’s text, with his epic and elegiac temperamento.
The result is a cruel but delicate sound landscape that shows the ability of Leopardi’s language to create deep poetry just looking at the bare reality, searching from the beautiful and sacred side of the real world.
The male children choir and the male vocal ensemble gives voice to some “aria del sonno” (Sleep aria) from baroque opera, while the other choirs represent an a cappella comment and reaction to the sleep. The sleep’s scene in the baroque opera is a dramatic device that creates an abnormal state of suspension, a diffused disbelief that generate unique musical expressions. The “music suggesting sleep” as Monteverdi defined it, is a fantastic occasion for the baroque composer to create melodic lines, slow and hesitant, a deformation of the normal timing, with circular, repetitive recurrences, sustained by unheard harmonic oscillations and do represent a great object of compositional analysis and treatment of the old fragments for the new work.
The brass trio represents the Deus ex machina. It could be described as a sort of ambivalent angel, looking from the outside at this ensemble of young and old people lost, isolated, in voluntary torpor.
They move everywhere through the scenic space and try to bring back to life them from this inner torpor.