Salvatore Sciarrino, Luci mie traditrici (1998)

So I watched this with zero background knowledge. I guess I kind of thought, oh, here's an Italian composer; maybe he'll be in the tradition of Verdi and Puccini. I freely admit that this was kind of a dumb thing to think; still, there's no way I could possibly have predicted the sheer magnitude of my wrongness.

The plot here is very simple: Renaissance duchess cheats on her husband with a guest; he kills them both (based on real events). So far so typical, but that is absolutely as far as the typicality goes, because this is the most avant-garde opera I've ever seen. It's arguable whether you'd actually call it an "opera" if there were a better term. But anyway. The music is...well, that might be overstating it. The "music" consists mainly of sort of ambient noise, punctuated by little squawks and chirrups. Occasionally there's a moment that's punctuated by something slightly more substantial, but only occasionally. I have no idea what the score here could possibly look like; most of it sounds completely random. And as for the singing: there are no extended musical numbers of even phrases, really: everything is clipped, dispassionate lines of mostly elliptical dialogue, with any emotion being carefully sublimated.

If this sounds like something you'd absolutely hate, well, maybe so. I think there would be something wrong with you if your initial reaction wasn't something like "what the shit is this? Seriously, is this a joke?" It certainly was mine, and honestly, if it were a full-length opera, I probably would've given up on it after just a few minutes. But it's only sixty-five minutes total, so I decided to stay the course and see if I could figure out what the heck was going on.

I often say that I like completely new artistic experiences, and this is definitely that. Be careful what you wish for? Well...maybe. And yet, after watching the whole thing and thinking about it for a while, I do feel that there's something here. Probably. It really does create this sort of poisonous Renaissance atmosphere. Sometimes, even in its less macabre moments, it reminded me of an Edward Gorey story, where you get a similar feeling of disembodied unease. I wouldn't want every opera to be like this; I probably wouldn't want anyother to be. And yet, on the whole, I'm glad it exists, and I'm glad to have seen it.