On our blog, our contemporary composers present their favorite composer from our catalogs. This time: Francesco Antonioni writes about Azio Corghi’s Divara.

“In 1996 while I was doing a PhD at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Azio Corghi had us listen to his opera Divara: Wasser und Blut (Divara: Water and Blood), composed on a libretto by José Saramago in 1993, five years before the Portuguese writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. I will never forget the deep emotional impact it had on me, and the realization that I had, as my teacher, not just a musician I was going to learn a great deal from but also a refined intellectual who was able to interpret the world through music and portray the contemporary human condition with clarity and depth.

The subject of Divara is the German Anabaptist heresy in the sixteenth century. It is an opera on utopia and on the failure of utopia, on the cruelty and abasement that are inextricably bound up with the exercise of power. Amidst a gory battle between religions (Catholics, Protestants and Anabaptists, each fighting against the other), the only chance of redemption attaches not to religion but to an ethic of individual responsibility.

Divara is more than anything else an opera about violence perpetrated without hatred by human beings who for whatever reason place themselves beyond judgment: the same kind of violence that has left its mark on centuries of Western history, recent history included, and that would also mark the beginning of the 21st century with the religiously inspired attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

The music of Divara is full of citations: from organ compositions by Liszt to early plainchants from Nonantola, from the Histoire du Soldat by Stravinsky to spectral music, from the sounds of slot machines in a Japanese gambling bar to Renaissance polyphony, all so well integrated into the dramatic progression that they emerge as orientation points and building blocks of musical significance. But in contrast with Alban Berg’s Wozzeck or Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten, in Divara even Expressionism is employed as citation.

In his music Corghi goes beyond the manifestation of a disapproval of the events represented on stage. He manages to point the finger at the inexorable transformation of our world from reality into fiction, the postmodern substitution of the principle of truth with narration, the manipulation of facts, the inevitable and culpable evolution of utopia into coercion.

Divara captures an essential point: pain and suffering have been replaced by their mere representation; history is not distinguished from a scene in a show, and criminals, in their guise as simple participants, actors in the show being staged, can now ask not for mercy but for absolution. Blood is replaced by water, which washes away every responsibility; history is covered over by narrative construction, which transforms the truth into fiction, into a story, so as to attempt to remove something that is so atrocious that a thinking human being could never admit it to himself.

In the same years that Divara was being composed, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben identified a key figure to understand the human condition in the postmodern era: the homo sacer, a man who, according to Roman jurisprudence, anyone could kill without committing homicide (G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford California, 1998). Thus, in Corghi–Saramago’s opera, it is a women, a victim, the wife Divara, that brings the men, lost in theological disputes and power struggles, back to the truth of their own lives.”

Azio Corghi: Divara (1993)
Dramma musicale in 3 atti dal dramma teatrale "In nomine Dei" di J. Saramago nella traduzione italiana di G.Lanciani.
World premiere: Münster, 31.10.1993
3.3.3.3. / 5.3.3.1. / Perc. (= 3 esec.) A. / Archi - elettronica


Francesco Antonioni's Ballata will have its German premiere at Kölner Philharmonie on November 16, 2014.

Antonioni: work list

Corghi: work list