Luci mie traditrici

The story of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, who murdered his wife and her lover in 1509 after he caught them red-handed, and then, in deep depression until his death, composed extremely moving and original sacred music, is a topic frequently taken up by contemporary artists, to mention only Werner Herzog’s film Death for Five Voices and Alfred Schnittke’s opera Gesualdo. Even before Luci mie traditrici Salvatore Sciarrino composed music for the puppet theatre entitled La terribile e spaventosa storia del Principe di Venosa e della bella Maria (The Appalling and Terrifying Story of Prince di Venosa and the Beautiful Mary). Sciarrino also arranged some of Gesualdo’s madrigals for instrumental ensembles (Le voci sottovetro, Gesualdo senza parole), making use of a wide array of extended performance techniques characteristic of his own music.

Contemporary authors usually present the Gesualdo story in a highly metaphorical manner, concentrating on selected aspects and diverging to a greater or lesser extent from the real historical events. Let us recall the facts. In 1586, for political reasons rather than for love, Carlo Gesualdo married the young widow Maria d’Avalos. Once she had borne him a son and thus the problem of succession had been solved, the Prince of Venosa dedicated himself again to his greatest passions: hunting and music. The neglected wife found herself a lover: Don Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria. The affair developed without disruption until the Prince’s friend, hurt in his pride by Donna Maria’s rejection of his advances, divulged the secret to her husband. Gesualdo set a trap for the lovers. He pretended to be out hunting, but soon returned to the palace, caught the two lovers together and ordered his footmen to kill them. He was protected from punishment by his social status and by the code of honour, and the dejection that accompanied him till the end of his life was caused not so much by qualms of conscience as by the fact that he had broken the code of conduct by having his footmen do the job rather than killing the lovers by himself, as a betrayed husband was supposed to do.

Sciarrino’s Luci mie traditrici draws on a 1664 play by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini entitled Il tradimento per l’onore, which tells a story similar to that of Gesualdo and Maria d’Avalos, but significantly different in details. The fact that Sciarrino’s opera is commonly and almost automatically associated with the biography of the Prince of Venosa is largely due to his life story being much better known than Cicognini’s play, which means that programme books and critical commentaries typically quote it. In Sciarrino’s opera the aristocratic couple’s family name, Malaspina, translates as “evil thorn,” and indeed in the opening scene the Countess is pricked by a rose thorn, which foreshadows the tragedy soon to come. The informer is a servant rather than another aristocrat, and also Count Malaspina behaves differently from Gesualdo: he first talks to his wife about love, in the evening he shows her the blood-covered body of her lover, and then murders her in person.

The protagonists’ dialogues are only a part of Sciarrino’s drama. Nuances of meaning, the atmosphere and the dramatic development are underlined by the music more suggestively than by words. It is the music that makes the tragedy of conflicting passions felt on the sensual level. The opera opens with Claude Le Jeune’s elegy on the passing away of beauty and love, composed in 1608, which loses its melodious quality in successive metamorphoses, turning into noises, and becomes an acoustic metaphor of horror, decay and death. Also the vocal parts—brief statements in fact (no arias in this opera), more recitative than song-like—undergo successive stages of reduction from speech to whisper and sighs, to the last bedroom scene between the Count and the Countess, in which we only hear breathing and dull strokes like those of a failing heartbeat. The vocal lines are pseudomanneristic, ornamental, rhythmically irregular. Their details convey what words can no longer express.

Silence and its borderline forms are one of Sciarrino’s most powerful forms of expression. Naturalistic noises that sound sometimes like remote cicadas are an amplification of the silence that falls between the protagonists’ utterances. It is to this perfect match between the means of expression and the presented content, achieved by quite unusual means, that the opera owes its immense success. Of the more than a dozen stage works by the Italian composer, Luci mie traditrici is the one most frequently staged, and definitely one of the most important operas of the recent decades.

Krzysztof Kwiatkowski

 

SYNOPSIS

ACT I

Prologue

A voice behind the curtain sings of lost love (an adaptation of a chanson by Claude Le Jeune).

Scene 1 (morning in the garden):

The Count shows his wife a hidden rose. The Countess plucks the rose. The Count warns her that it has thorns. The Countess pricks her hand on the thorns. Her hand is bleeding. The Count curses the rose and says his wife’s blood is too high a price for a mere flower. The Countess denies: It is not too high if a new rose is born out of the blood. The Count faints.

 

Scene 2 (still in the garden):

The Count comes round and talks to the Countess about love.

The Countess: He who loves has courage.

The Count: He who loves has fears.

The Countess: I am brave because I love you.

The Count: I am full of fears, because I adore you.

The Countess and The Count vow to love each other forever. A servant, who is in love with the Countess, is eavesdropping on them, and his hopeless love fills him with despair.

 

Scene 3 (in the garden around noon):

The Guest and the Countess discover their passion for each other. Awareness of this feeling makes them embarrassed. They feel helpless at the mercy of their passion. They hope their lustful eyes will never meet.

Guest: My eyes betray me.

The Countess: The treacherous light of my eyes.

 

Scene 4 (in the garden at noon):

The envious servant hears the lovers declare their love and arrange a tryst. The Countess shows the Guest a little gate to the garden, hidden behind jasmine bushes.

 

Scene 5 (afternoon in the palace):

The servant informs the Count of the planned tryst: Care for your honour makes me speak. The Count answers: I was not dishonoured as long as you kept silent. The Count senses a great imminent tragedy, but he feels he has to defend his honour.

 

Act II

Scene 6 (in the palace at dusk):

The Countess says she regrets and shows remorse.

The Count forgives her and asks: How is it that you love me? Do you love me as much as yourself? The Countess answers: No, because then I would have to hate you.

The Countess and The Count pledge undying love for each other again. The Countess is to wait for the Count in the evening.

 

Scene 7 (evening in the palace):

The Countess embroiders a pillow with floral patterns. This is going to be a gift for the Count. But the Count’s words sound ambiguous and disturbing. They both prepare to retire to their marriage bed.

 

Scena 8 (night in the palace):

There is something vaguely ominous in Count’s declarations of love. The Countess says she is ready to sacrifice her life for the Count.

The Count: But remember – death is something terrible.

The Countess approaches the bed.

The Count stops her: Let me light a candle.

The Countess: What for?

The Count: As a token of faith.

The Countess: As one does for the dead?

The Count confirms and leads her to the bed: Speak to the one who is lying there.

The Countess: Who is in this bed?

The Count: The one you loved too much.

The Countess hesitates. The Count forces her to open the curtains. The Guest is lying on the bed in a pool of blood. The Count stabs his wife to death with a dagger (or a sword) saying: Here, this is your thorn, and then: Farewell, farewell, now I will live in torment forever.