Just a few months ago his Julius Caesar, a specially written opera, inaugurated the season of the Costanzi in Rome, and now Giorgio Battistelli, composer and music organizer (he is artistic director of the Puccini Festival and of the Haydn Orchestra), is about to give the stage a further new title of musical theater: Le baruffe, libretto taken from the homonymous comedy by Goldoni and prepared by the composer himself with the director Damiano Michieletto, who also signs the staging of this première scheduled at the Fenice in Venice (from 22 February ).
Freedom in the work
From Shakespeare to Goldoni. Meanwhile, another work by Battistelli is announced for 2023, Pasolini’s Theorem, this time commissioned by the Deutsche Oper of Berlin. With Le baruffe, his catalog of theatrical scores reaches the considerable number of 35 titles; and scrolling through it reveals the most diverse sources of inspiration: Verne, Kepler, Shakespeare, but also Genesis and topics related to ecology and the world of work. “Luciano Berio, to whom a great affinity has united me”, Battistelli tells us, “he always told me that we composers have the fortune of great freedom: thanks to music we can enter any place of fantasy and reality, in a story as in a news story.
The baroque chiozzotte
A creative freedom that guides us where we feel there is an expressive dimension, and which becomes heterogeneity of themes and styles. In the comedy Le baruffe chiozzotte, I felt all the greatness of Goldoni, intriguing and articulate, especially in the dialogues ».
The birth of Le baruffe
Battistelli’s baruffe, thirteen singers on stage, a choir and an orchestra with a classical ensemble but with an important presence of percussion, are born from the input of Fortunato Ortombina, superintendent of the Fenice: to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the publishing house Marsilio, who is publishing the national edition of Goldoni’s Works. “Writing a work today addressing an eighteenth-century author seems antiquated”, says Battistelli, “but when I reread Le baruffe, I immediately felt a precise atmosphere, and I wrote it down on the score:” Fresco of voices with fog ” “.
And how did you recreate this fresco? «By studying the Chiozzotto dialect that animates the dialogues of this comedy, and recreating it in singing with well-marked and asymmetrical rhythmic structures, to recover the excited and popular sound of those dialogues. The villagers of Chioggia fight, argue: but for what? They are timeless quarrels: after all, a metaphor for what happens in everyday life ».