Luci mie traditrici

Salvatore Sciarrino. Opera in two acts
2012, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre

Caterina Panti Liberovici, director
The opera “Luci mie traditrici” (“The False light of My Eyes”) was written by Salvatore Sciarinno in 1998 and produced by operatic theaters in Frankfurt-an-Main, Lyons, Passau and Vienna. In 2008 it became the most conspicuous event of the Salzburg festival. In Russia the opera “Luci miei traditrici” sounded for the first time.
The opera’s plot deals with real events from the life of Carlo Gesualdo di Venosa, the late Renaissance mannerist composer. The libretto is based on the principles of the theatrical aesthetics of the Renaissance period reinterpreted in a Postmodernist vein. Its symbolic attributes – the times of day (morning, afternoon, evening), oath of true love, infidelity, jealousy, a hunt, the aroma of a flower and the smell of blood – demonstrate the connections between erotic desires and death. Working in the genre of the avant-garde symbolist musical theater, Sciarrino aspires to return to the genre of opera its initial connotation – that of dramma per musica. The refined sound space of the composition stems from the harmonic liberties prescribed the by the era, creating a sound panorama of the inner anxiety in the soul of the main protagonist, who, having committed a murder, wrote beautiful madrigals.