FULL IL PRIGIONIERO (Dallapiccola) & Il canto sospeso (Nono) Salzburg 2024 Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, Georg Nigl, John Daszak
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Il prigioniero
- Composer: Dallapiccola Luigi
- Libretto: Luigi Dallapiccola based on Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adams La Torture par l’espérance and Charles De Costers La Légende d’Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak
- Venue & Opera Company: Felsenreitschule, Salzburg, Austria, Salzburger Festspiele
- Recorded: July 25, 2024
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, Georg Nigl, John Daszak, Andrew Lepri Meyer, Timo Janzen
- Conductor: Maxime Pascal
- Orchestra: ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien
- Chorus: Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks
- Chorus Master: Peter Dijkstra
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: ORF, Unitel, ARTE
- Date Published: 2024
- Format: Broadcast
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: yessubs, desubs
- Video Recording from: ON ORF FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Il prigoniero is an opera in a prologue and one act composed by Luigi Dallapiccola based on anItalian-language libretto that the musician wrote based on works by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (the story La torture par l’espèrance ) and Charles de Coster ( La lègende d’Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak ).
The first performance took place in radio form on 1 December 1949 in concert at the RAI Auditorium in Turin ; the first performance in stage form was on 20 May 1950 at the Teatro Comunale in Florence , as part of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.
The first performance had a “warm and unchallenged” success. The musicologist Andrea Della Corte however found the music “labile, in successions always organated, but rarely imbued with lyrical virtue”. ; according to Della Corte the best moments of the opera, in which Dallapiccola uses the twelve-tone technique extensively , were those in which “the scenic action and the words impose themselves”. The solo voices “are sometimes recitative, even with intentionally imprecise or spoken intonations”. The opera includes two choral interludes sung by an internal choir, the first to separate the prologue from the first act, the second to introduce the final scene in the garden.
Plot
Period: the second half of the 16th century . The prisoner is held in Spanish prisons, at the time of King Philip II . He receives a visit from his mother, haunted by a nightmare, recounted in the prologue, in which the king appears to her in the guise of Death. The prisoner remembers that after the torture someone called him brother, and seems to have a moment of relief. The jailer enters, who uses the word brother again, and announces to him that the uprising of the beggars has been successful. Hope is reborn in the prisoner, and the feeling is strengthened when he discovers that the jailer has left the prison door open. The prisoner tries to escape, in the corridors he manages to avoid two priests who are talking to each other, then he goes out into a garden. Here he is captured by the Grand Inquisitor, who has the same figure and the same voice as the jailer, who calls him brother once again but then gently leads him to the stake. “Freedom?”, the prisoner asks himself in an almost unconscious whisper, after having looked at the stake laughing like a madman.