projects

Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore
Drammaturgia after Luigi Pirandello for 6 voices and orchestra
Text from Luigi Pirandello
Commission: Orchestra Nazionale della Rai, Torino
First performance: 3-2-2012, Rai Nuova Musica
Neue Vocalsolisten, Orchestra Nazionale della Rai,
Marco Angius (conductor)
Publisher: Rai Trade
Duration: 20’ca


This work, planned as musical theatre to be staged in concert form, is conceived as a dramaturgical analysis of the relationship between Pirandello and some of his best- known characters.

Based on the three short stories, Personaggi (1906) [Characters], La tragedia di un personaggio (1911) [A Character's Tragedy], Colloqui coi personaggi (1915) [Conversations with Characters], the novel fragment Sei personaggi (1927) [Six Characters] and the two versions of Sei personaggi in cerca di autore (1921, 1925) [Six Characters in Search of an Author], the six voices stage the tale of the writer who is visited, indeed nearly attacked, by the motley mass of his mental creations.

Pirandello himself speaks of the evolution of this relationship, of the insistent presence of these characters in his mind: "I wrote this play in order to rid myself of a nightmare", and he tells us of the battle between him and them for a role in his work. "And now one, now another, but also often one breaking in on the other, they would start recounting their sad stories, loudly having their say, all flinging their unseemly passions in my face";
"Thus they became in themselves — in this struggle with me that they had to keep up for their very lives — dramatic characters, and they learned how to defend themselves from me". The author seeks the characters' motivations in this battle for actual existence, especially for those of them who seem to want an active life as characters within the "non-life" of the theatre: "A dreadful and desperate situation, especially for the two, the Father and the Stepdaughter, who aspire, more than the others, to live, and are conscious, more than the others, that they are characters, that is that they absolutely require a play, and hence a play of their own".

The six voices are called upon to bring to life these characters in a drama — chosen for the libretto with attention to the evolution of Pirandello's concept in the various works he wrote on the subject, as well as to his critical and self-critical observations — restoring the characters' process of self-definition by means of an ad personam vocal treatment, specific to each character.
Because of their extraordinary stage presence and metamorphic bravura, their vocal virtuosity in the service of character definition, the control and refinement born of their experience, the Neue Vocalsolisten of Stuttgart are the ideal solo ensemble for this project. As they are simultaneously soloists and a group, they are asked to recreate the atmosphere of "necessary incarceration" that Pirandello created and to diversify their characters

Dramaturgy
The character known as the Manager, the bass Andreas Fischer, later becomes an impromptu author, then blends with the actual author, Pirandello, in an Escher-like connection of three realities. He is the most well-defined and concrete of the characters, a violent and influential presence, the director of the presences and absences of the others, and he uses the full power of his voice, without straying from belcanto techniques, and explores the outer limits of his range in moments of reflection and self-criticism.
The Wild Daughter, a very beautiful young prostitute, represents the sacrifice and defeat of the family and is the character who most influences the action, always impulsively and by force.
The mezzo-soprano Truike van der Poel will use torrid, folkloric tones, with subliminal references to the vocal traditions of Sicily.
The Father, the ambiguous person in charge, the mysterious culprit and deplorable saviour of family affairs, always wavering between good intentions and terrible expedients, is a metamorphic soul par excellence, constantly seeking understanding and dialogue, particularly with the author. The baritone Guillermo Anzorena will continually pass from delicate, chamber music tones to harsh solos, identifying with the other voices, imitating them in their distinct characterisations as if his voice were meant to evoke the vocal worlds of each of them and seek to adapt itself to unfamiliar and impossible registers.
The Grieving Mother, interpreted by the soprano Susanne Leitz-Lorey, is Pirandello's most anguished character, and she never abandons this identity. Her female passivity is also represented by the passivity of the character and her theme is the lament.
Her voice will progressively record the history of the lament in music, from folk music through exquisite Baroque examples, up to the Expressionist lament, with long, sustained and dramatic sounds.
The Son, Martin Nagy, tenor, is an incompletely defined character, a tight-lipped loner.
All welknow of him is that he refuses to take part in the game, and that he loathes his father's and his prostitute half-sister's ill-advised effusions. His voice is elegant, reserved, delicate, like that of a Dallapiccola character. He speaks to himself, hardly ever to the audience, and he witnesses the action with restrained disapproval, which he expresses by means of vocal utterances of wonder and resentment, inflected sighs of panic, suspense or impatience borrowed from everyday language.
The Adolescent, bewildered, at a loss, a jointless marionette of a character who silently witnesses the child's death and then shoots himself, is a pure, hieratic and innocent figure. The soprano Sarah Maria Sun interprets him with a linear vocal style, a virtuosic exploration of his inner self and an invocation of Baroque vocality, with warm and refined tones. His final gesture, suicide, is a sudden up-ending of reality, terminating everything, and causing the death of his voice.
The Child who drowns, while the others are looking elsewhere and her brother fails to intervene, is also interpreted by the silvery voice of the soprano Sarah Maria Sun, and is a wordless but continuous presence. Last-born and first to die, she is the reason for the others' sacrifice, the rationale of the tragedy. Her voice is a continuum, a given melodic line; it is almost always humming, simple but obsessive, and it links all the other voices with one another: it is their foundation and their resolution, determining their harmonic development and their modulations.

Acoustic visions, in the absence of a set
The orchestra behind the soloists represents the presence of others, of the world outside the characters assembled by the mind of Pirandello: first the actors of the company in rehearsal, then the audience to whom the characters present themselves, and then also the stage itself, the theatre. The orchestral score will define the formal boundaries, in keeping with Pirandello's plot, with anticipations and ritornellos as called for by the text, a sort of musical moviola dealing with the action. For each character the orchestra will create a 'set', a background that can be recognised and associated with the character in question.

But it will also provide a formal definition of salient moments, such as the violent first- act curtain, the still water in which the little girl drowns, the pistol shot that marks the end of the group of characters and the beginning of reality and hence the failure of the stage play.
The orchestral musicians will at times participate by speaking or playing like normal actors or like a curious audience, questioning the characters and occasionally paraphrasing or satirically imitating them, like the actors in the company in Pirandello's play, or else like the friends of the playwright who, according to many well-documented reports, first witnessed with astonishment Pirandello's reading of the text, and then helped him with their criticisms and comments.