Alemania
Arguments from Reason
Jesse Simon
Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema is not
long on dialogue: its first American distributor even tried to turn the film’s
lengthy silences into a selling point, with one early poster claiming “there
are only 923 words spoken [in the film] … but it says everything”. Indeed,
Pasolini makes his arguments – such as they are – less through spoken words
than through ambiguities of action and gesture, purposeful juxtapositions and
sudden cross-cuts to desolate landscapes. If the film still has the power to
provoke discussion and analysis more than fifty years after it was released, it
is precisely because it refuses to clarify itself by giving its characters
recourse to language.
For this reason alone Teorema would
seem an unlikely choice of raw material for an opera. Yet Giorgio Battistelli’s
Il Teorema di Pasolini – commissioned by and given its world première at
the Deutsche Oper Berlin – was just as oddly compelling as its source. While it
followed the structure of the original quite closely, it was often closer to an
exegesis than an adaptation; yet with its immediately appealing score and a
complex but cohesive staging from theatre group Dead Centre, the opera offered
an engaging commentary on the spiritual unease at the heart of Pasolini’s
enigmatic story.
Where many of Pasolini’s earlier films
favoured an unvarnished realism (and a preference for non-professional actors),
Teorema is a work of abstraction that proceeds according to its own
rigorously schematic logic. A mysterious visitor arrives at the house of a
wealthy Milanese family and lives with them for a few days as a guest. During
that time, each member of the household – starting with Emilia (the maid), and
continuing through Pietro (the son), Lucia (the mother), Odetta (the daughter),
and finally Paolo (the father) – experiences an intense sexual desire for
the visitor, which is quickly consumated.
When the visitor suddenly announces he must
leave, his absence provokes a different spiritual crisis in each character: the
daughter, her fist clenched, refuses to leave her bed and is eventually
committed to an institution; the son attempts to start a career as a painter;
the mother cruises the streets in search of sexual encounters with young men
who vaguely resemble the visitor; the maid returns to her rural home and
becomes venerated as a miracle-performing saint before burying herself alive on
a construction site; the father, wandering through the Central Station, strips
off all his clothes and is next seen wandering aimlessly through the desolate
volcanic landscape that has been glimpsed sporadically throughout the film.
Giorgio Battistelli: ‘Il Teorema di Pasolini’. Daniel Cohen, conductor. Dead Centre, directors. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, June 2023. © 2023 by Eike Walkenhorst.
Il Teorema is,
in fact, Mr Battistelli’s second attempt to bring Pasolini’s elusive work to
the stage. An earlier version, written in the late 1980s at the suggestion of
Hans Werner Henze and first performed in 1990, featured only a single vocal
part – for a speaker – and assigned the roles of the family to silent
actors. For Il Teorema, Mr Battistelli has expanded the work to an hour
and three-quarters – roughly the length of the film – and turned all
six characters into singing roles. The music, although rooted in the
compositional idioms and expanded instrumental techniques of the second half of
the twentieth century, is neither obscure nor dogmatic: indeed the range and
fluidity of Mr Battistelli’s style – his ability to move easily between static
clouds of sound and passages of rhythmic propulsion – offered a necessary
counterbalance to the rigid formality of the narrative structure.
Among the precipitous brass glissandi,
texturally intricate string writing and decisive thumps of the bass drum, one
could also hear subtle electro-acoustic flourishes, often in the form of gently
unsettled ambient noise that crept in during the interludes of the opera’s
first half. In the captivating instrumental interlude that bridged the work’s
two halves the sudden interjection of choral voices, which sounded as though
they came from an especially wobbly tape recorder, added to the mounting sense
of existential crisis. Yet the non-orchestral elements were used sparingly as
part of an expanded sonic palette, and never threatened to distract from the
dramatic focus of the score.
The libretto – written by the composer
– was intriguingly unconventional. Instead of using the (fairly banal)
dialogue from the film or writing new dialogue appropriate to the scenes, the
libretto had each of the characters describe their actions in the third person.
On the one hand, this approach had a distancing effect – the stage action was
less a drama than a factual description of a drama – which helped to
preserve some of the film’s tone of clinical detachment. However by putting the
action into words, the libretto was also forced to add its own interpretive
gloss and, in doing so, removed some of the story’s essential ambiguities.
Although Mr Battistelli drew on Pasolini’s own novel of Teorema to fill
in some of the philosophical gaps, there were a few scenes in which simple
description crossed the line into the kind of explanation that Pasolini
– in his film version at least – so rigorously avoided.
Giorgio Battistelli: ‘Il Teorema di Pasolini’. Daniel Cohen, conductor. Dead Centre, directors. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, June 2023. © 2023 by Eike Walkenhorst.
The staging, by Dead Centre, updated the
action to the present day – the teenaged Odetta wore a pair of modern
headphones – while paying tribute to the look of Pasolini’s film in ways
both subtle (the muted colours of the rooms) and not-so-subtle (Lucia was given
the iconic hairstyle worn by Silvana Mangano). Much of the opera’s first half,
took place within six smaller compartments that were reconfigured continually
into the different rooms of the house. The character of each room was defined,
to some extent, by wallpaper that turned out to be a video back-projection.
There was also video projected onto a scrim at the front of the stage and,
completing the video trifecta, a live cameraman whose filmed close-ups were
mixed into the other projections. Yet for all that the staging must have been a
back-stage nightmare of logistics and technology, the complexity never seemed
contrived and the myriad visual elements were carefully integrated into a
unified vision of the story.
The staging also inevitably added a layer
of its own: the scenes in the house during the opera’s first half were
presented as an experiment in behavioural psychology, monitored by a group of
scientists in white protective suits. (The technical readouts of the
experiment, projected onto the scrim, were among the staging’s few notable missteps:
the data, which included such too-clever additions as ‘Temperature: Too hot to
sleep’ and ‘Time: Later than you think’, looked as though they had been written
by a bored intern). The group of scientists were, in fact, the singers and each
of the characters – except the visitor, who moved between the two worlds – was
doubled by an actor. In the opera’s second half, the scientific apparatus was
dismantled and the singers took the place of the actors as the repercussions of
the experiment began to expand beyond the confines of the six compartments.
Giorgio Battistelli: ‘Il Teorema di Pasolini’. Daniel Cohen, conductor. Dead Centre, directors. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, June 2023. © 2023 by Eike Walkenhorst.
Among the solid ensemble cast the Odetta of
Meechot Marrero and the Lucia of Ángeles Blancas Gulin stood out for the
heightened, occasionally frantic passions that they displayed, especially in
their respective scenes in the second half, while Monica Bacelli as Emilia and
Davide Damiani as Paolo brought subtle authority to each of their appearances. Under
the scrupulous direction of Daniel Cohen, the orchestra sounded fully attuned
to the textural variety of the score, providing gently rhythmic drive to the
fluctuating string passages, but investing the most explosive moments with
necessary heft.
Between the structure of Mr Battistelli’s
libretto and the directly referential moments of the staging, it was nearly
impossible to view Il Teorema without also considering the work on which
it was based. This may, however, have been Mr Battistelli’s intent: for all its
invention, the opera seemed less a standalone work than an extended discussion
with ideas and themes found in its source. This is in no way intended to
diminish Mr Battistelli’s achievement: in transposing those themes to the
operatic stage he was often able to expand upon them in ways that enriched
one’s appreciation of both works. If Il Teorema erred occasionally on
the side of explanation, its finest moments were able to fill the famous
silences of Pasolini’s original in the best way possible.
Comentarios