Il Ritorno di Ulisse in Patria

Year : 2022

Service : Music Theater, Set and lighting design

TRAGEDY WITH A HAPPY ENDING IN A PROLOGUE AND THREE ACTS (DIVIDED INTO TWO PARTS) Poetry by Giacomo Badoaro Music by Claudio Monteverdi Critical Edition by Bernardo Ticci – BTE – Bernardo Ticci Editions, 2021

CONCERT MASTER AND CONDUCTOR: Ottavio Dantone

DIRECTION, SCENES, LIGHTS, AND VIDEO:Luigi De Angelis

COSTUMES AND DRAMATURGY: Chiara Lagani

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: Andrea Argentieri

PROJECT: Fanny & Alexander

ORCHESTRA: Accademia Bizantina

CHARACTERS AND PERFORMERS:Ulisse: Mauro BorgioniTelemaco: Anicio Zorzi Giustiniani
Penelope: Delphine Galou

Iro: Bruno Taddia

Time/Antinoo: Roberto Lorenzi

Juno: Raffaella Milanesi

Fortune: Vittoria Magnarello

Jupiter: Gianluca Margheri

Neptune: Federico Domenico Eraldo Sacchi

Minerva: Giuseppina Bridelli

Love: Paola Valentina Molinari

Anfinomo: Francisco Fernandez Rueda

Pisandro: Enrico Torre

Melanto/Humana Fragilità: Gaia Petrone

Eurimaco: Alessio Tosi

Eumete: Luigi Morassi

Ericlea: Anna Bessi

Production: Monteverdi Festival, Fondazione Teatro Ponchielli

New Staging

Director’s Notes
by Luigi De Angelis

Since I was asked to stage The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland, I could not help but repeatedly recall a vivid memory from my university days in Bologna. With Chiara Lagani – co-founder of Fanny & Alexander, who is responsible for the dramaturgy and costumes of this production – we had the incredible fortune of attending the lectures of one of the greatest geographers of our time, Franco Farinelli. His monographic course focused on the deconstruction and philosophical reading of the myth of Ulysses, making him the prototype of the modern hero, a precursor and emblem of the coming of a new world, in fact, modernity itself.

As Farinelli said, Ulysses is the hero who blinds Polyphemus in the cave, the opposite of an archaic world, governed by tactile, vertical, emotional hierarchies. Ulysses, on the other hand, is the man of calculation, lies, and deceit, using a false identity for his own strategic purposes. Farinelli argues that in the encounter between Ulysses and Polyphemus in the cave lies the key to the advent of modernity… Ulysses identifies himself with Polyphemus under the name of “Outis,” “No one,” so when Polyphemus asks the other giants to help him capture “No one,” they obviously do not assist him… He blinds Polyphemus and, to escape his blind fury, hides under the lead sheep. The hero of our myth, Ulysses, places himself under the belly of the ram, knowing that Polyphemus, instinctively, can only use his tactile knowledge of the world to identify him; he becomes “sub-iectum,” one who hides beneath (from “sub-icere”)… It’s a successful strategy, but at the same time, it involves an identity annulment. It is Ulysses’ paradox—he must become “no one” to “be,” he can no longer be recognized, and this is his damnation, even when he returns home, where no one recognizes him—not his son, nor his wife, nor the shepherd Eumete. He himself does not recognize Ithaca when the Phaeacians leave him on the shore. Only Ericlea, the maid who had cared for him as a child, recognizes the scar from a boar’s tusk when she touches his leg. Ulysses uses calculation, measuring space and time, applying the logic of a homogeneous space, in contrast to the striations and inconsistencies of an ancient world where space does not exist because it is immeasurable. Ulysses invents the idea of modern space—divisible, measurable; he is the prototype of the modern man who places the image of the world above the direct experience of the world. His myth almost seems to warn against the contemporary intoxication of images, as the “ease” of images, to use James Hillman’s words, is surface-level, “facade” (from Latin facies), but has nothing to do with true seeing, which is connected to the heart, with a non-homogeneous logic of spatial and vital relationships. To see and prefigure, Ulysses must “disappear,” lose his identity, take on the posture of a fragile hero, wander for 20 years, become a beggar, risk losing his loved ones—somehow, in order to survive, he must disconnect from reality, hiding behind a plan. Minerva, in the Greek conception of polytheism, embodies a deep, combative, calculating, and vengeful aspect.

The entire work converges from the beginning toward the crucial scene—the killing of the suitors, toward the trial of the bow, in which Ulysses will be the only one able to string the bow and kill all the suitors, committing a massacre that today would resemble public mass shootings (for example, in the United States), which often make the headlines in contemporary news. Staging Ulysses today must inevitably engage with this obsessive idea of the scene, with the concept that everything today is somehow “targeted,” under constant threat. Today, everything is “targeted,” part of a market-driven and consumer-based perspective, which allows no exceptions, incongruities, or any logic that does not envision the monetization of values—be it aesthetic or cosmetic. Everything must be neatly categorized, spendable, able to circulate quickly, be consumed, and recognized according to the logic of the target. Everything tends toward the extreme, in a vortex where the logic of war seems the natural apex of Ulysses’ perspective.

The gods are dead, unrecognizable, perhaps surviving in some beautiful advertisement, their forms and signs, their invisible spores, relegated to mere consumer goods, to pure aesthetics. They themselves are targets, “targets,” no longer expressing themselves except through symbols that lack vitality. They are no longer connected to humanity, condemned to two-dimensionality, to empty gestures, circulating as mere currency and becoming invisible.

The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland is a work of shocking modernity because it explores themes that are very close to us, from Penelope’s unhealing wound, holed up in the toxic loop of abandonment, feeding on a profound pain but unable to overcome or process the separation, to the syndrome of Telemachus, the orphaned son of his father, and to Ulysses, the hero condemned to be unrecognized by anyone, precisely in the days of his return home… Always, someone else must vouch for him. The score of this marvelous and experimental work offers multiple layers of interpretation and takes us on an emotional journey, with a nearly cinematic pace, sudden scene and narrative changes, in which the music reflects the varied nature of the story’s many variations, with pages that seem to have been written in the 20th century.

Staging it in Cremona means confronting the extraordinary architecture of the Teatro Ponchielli, which lends itself naturally to being experienced as the “palace” of Penelope and Ulysses, for which the orchestra is somehow summoned as the court orchestra of Penelope. Based on this premise, where the theater itself is the palace, the place of our stories, the fable unfolds in modern times, and perhaps Ulysses was abandoned by the Phaeacians on the banks of the Po and not in Ithaca. Because this is a story that concerns us all, reflecting the disease of our time…