Although not a new thing, playing with a monument of literature like Dante’s Inferno must prove tricky. Using it as a libretto for an opera is very daring. That’s what composer Lucia Ronchetti does, using Dante’s actual verses from The Divine Comedy. The Italian premiere of Inferno, commissioned by the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, follows the concert performance premiere in Frankfurt in 2021, where the text used was partially in German. A selection of the most memorable episodes from the Inferno is presented here using Dante’s hendecasyllables.
Director David Hermann and set designer Jo Schramm stage the action not in what would be the classical iconography of hell (admittedly, rather hard to recreate on stage), but in its exact opposite: a sleek, contemporary house with a luxury spa-hotel look. Three floors replace the circles of hell, and a lift brings Dante, played by a warm-voiced Francesco Ragno, up and down during his infernal encounters. This choice is baffling and one is hard pressed to find a meaning to it. “We are interested in the everyday hell” explains Hermann. From a literal hell to a metaphorical, psychological one then. The visual packaging is elegant, with mostly contemporary costumes by Maria Grazia Chiuri and dramatic lighting by Fabrice Kebour.
Instead of Virgil, we have an ensemble of four male voices (Ensemble Neue Vocalsolisten) representing Dante’s inner voice. Unusually for the Italian tradition of opera, there are many parts simply spoken with no musical accompaniment. This choice really suits the raw material of Dante’s poetry, of course – dense, powerful and self-sufficient. All the characters, except for Francesca (Laura Catrani), Ulysses (Leonardo Cortellazzi) and Lucifer (Andreas Fischer), are played by actors, who all gave incisive performances, but Aurelio Mandraffino‘s Pier Delle Vigne stood out.
Ronchetti’s score, played by the Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma under conductor Tito Ceccherin, is inventive, although the instrumentation is limited to a string quartet, brass and percussion ensemble. Her music is mostly descriptive or onomatopoeic (like the swinging cello signifying Francesca’s wandering spirit). Both its strengths – and its weaknesses – lie in its experimental nature, a laboured search for a potential new language for opera. The vocal writing encompasses a contemporary, fractured sound mixed with several quotations from centuries of music and opera: from the Medieval aria of Francesca Da Rimini, to the prosecution of her story in a more “veristic” style, to Gregorian chants and polyphony.
“Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate”: abandon all hope – of melody, that is! – ye who enter here! This verse is shouted by the chorus, which is here called to an unusually disharmonious role, placed down in the pit, representing the voices of the damned and of the devils.
The final words of the opera are written by Tiziano Scarpa and pronounced by Lucifer. These give away the creators’s chosen reading of Dante’s work: all that we encounter in life, and seem to recognise, is only a reflection of who we are; or at least of a part of us.
Conceptually, everything seems perfect, but the opera leaves a strong aftertaste of the experimental. Ronchetti’s work, both musically and theatrically, doesn’t rise from the level of intellectual play and leaves one rather cold. One of the main issues with it is the strongly descriptive nature of the score, which only highlights the horror of the story, but hardly the beauty of the verses. The paradox is that Dante reaches sublime poetic heights while describing the abyss of hell. And that’s the crux of any artistic endeavour: it’s not (so much) the what, but the how. The most powerful element of the evening remained Dante’s words.
