Lyniv, Ansini (Colasanti, Strauss)

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Silvia Colasanti, born in 1975, is in the front rank of the most influential and most performed Italian composers. Her three monodramas Arianna, Fedra and Didone (for speaking voice, female chorus and orchestra) are the third and last work of a triptych devoted to classical myth, completing Minotauro and Proserpine. Love is the protagonist of this cycle. The source is Ovid’s Epistulae Heroidum: imaginary letters of love, of distance and of death, built on the theme of the beloved’s absence, marked by a nostalgic tone for a happy past and by the desperate wish to live it again. Harrowing letters, which retrace different love stories and show them no longer from the hero’s perspective, weak in his refusal, but from that of the abandoned woman, who becomes the true heroine. Ariadne writes to Theseus as soon as she wakes, realising that he has abandoned her and fled by sea. Phaedra, in love with her stepson Hippolytus, writes a seductive letter to induce him to yield to an impossible, incestuous love. Dido, feeling the inevitability of her death, writes to Aeneas in one last vain attempt to make him turn back.
Ein Heldenleben, op. 40 (TrV 190)

With «A Hero’s Life» Richard Strauss brought to a close, in 1898, the successful series of his symphonic poems, before the theatrical turn inaugurated by Salome in 1905 and Elektra in 1909. At the opposite pole from Beethovenian heroism, the work is a kind of autobiography in music that raises Strauss’s own life to the ideal plane of an emblematic existence, divided into six sections: The Hero; The Hero’s Adversaries; The Hero’s Companion; The Hero’s Battlefield; The Hero’s Works of Peace; The Hero’s Withdrawal from the World and Fulfilment. Metaphorically, then, it is a monument to the composer, who at thirty-four retraces the battles fought before he was able to assert his authenticity as an artist. But beyond the self-celebratory aspect, sustained in any case by some of Strauss’s most astonishing music, Ein Heldenleben deals with two important themes of the German composer’s poetics: the individual torn between the inner and the outer world, and the depth of domestic love.
ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS OF TEATRO COMUNALE DI BOLOGNA