Interview: Salvatore Sciarrino - 'My problem

is I want to change the world'

His stage works are performed and acclaimed throughout Europe, but this week's
Buxton opera festival production is a UK first. Salvatore Sciarrino talks to Andrew
Clements about how, and why, he composes

Rehearsals for Sciarrino's The Killing Flower.

Andrew Clements
Mon 15 Jul ‘13 16.17 BST

C
onversations with Salvatore Sciarrino can be wonderfully discursive. We meet to
talk first and foremost about his opera Luci Mie Traditrici, which Music Theatre
Wales is about to stage for the first time in the UK under the English title
(suggested by Sciarrino himself), The Killing Flower. Our discussion, however,
ranges from Tibetan thangas, to why the British in particular are so fascinated by the
paintings of Piero della Francesca, and from the pet sparrow that he had as a boy in
Sicily, to the birds that breed in the Po delta.

Now 66, Sciarrino is firmly established as one of the leading European composers of our
time. His music inhabits an instantly recognisable soundworld of fragile, fleeting events
that are often teetering on the edge of inaudibility, pushing instruments to the limits of
their ranges and pitching voices into ambiguous territory somewhere between song and
whispered speech. He has composed some 14 music-theatre pieces to date, of which
Luci Mie Traditrici has become the most successful - one of the most widely performed
European operas of recent times with three versions on disc as well as another on DVD.

But Michael McCarthy's production for MTW will not only be the work's British
premiere, but the first time any of Sciarrino's operas has been presented here – over the
last decade and more, it seems, his work has been yet another victim of British
companies' almost systematic neglect of European music theatre.

But then Sciarrino is not, I sense, someone who is very comfortable at self-promotion, or
too concerned about working the new-music system. Though he taught there in the late
1970s, he visits Milan very rarely now. He spent the early part of his life in big cities,
growing up in Palermo, Sicily, and studying in Rome before moving to Milan, but for the
last 30 years he's lived in Città di Castello in Umbria.

Settling in that small town, he says, was

"the best thing I did in my life – I have an
ideal atelier, with good air and the light;
it's in the middle of the town, but it's molto
tranquillo. It changed my music; when
you're in Milan you have to follow the
rhythm of the city."

The result has been an immense

outpouring of works over the last three
decades, taking in almost every musical
genre. But relatively few of those have
been written to order, for Sciarrino has
remained very wary of accepting
commissions, and of being trapped on the
treadmill of having to complete works by a
'Composers must be free'... Salvatore Sciarrino deadline. "I have seen fantastic young
talents destroyed because they accepted
all the commissions that they were offered," he says. "I can write 10 or 15 pieces in a
year, but sometimes it may be just one or two. It's a problem; composers must be free,
but we also need money. I am very lucky; I am able to live and the quality of my life is
very high."

He often accepts a commission only after a work has been completed, and Luci Mie
Traditrici – a literal translation would be "My betraying eyes", though Sciarrino says that
doesn't convey the sense of erotic possession implied in the Italian, hence his choice of a
completely different title for the English translation – was first performed at the
Schwetzingen festival in 1998. The libretto is based upon the play Il Tradimento per
l'Honore, which was first published in Rome in 1664.

It unfolds the gruesome story of an Italian count, called Il Malaspina in the opera, and
his wife (La Malaspina), who entertain a mysterious and unnamed guest. The countess
and the stranger make love, but a servant betrays them to the count, who forgives his
wife for her infidelity before revealing the corpse of her lover and then killing her. It was
originally thought to be the work of Giacinto Cicognini, who wrote one of the very first
Italian plays based upon the Don Giovanni story and also produced very successful
librettos for Cavalli and other Venetian composers in the 1640s, but since the opera was
first performed it's been discovered that Cicognini was not its author at all, and that the
play was attributed to him on publication simply to increase its sales.

When he'd first read the text, Sciarrino had been struck by the similarity of its plot to the
story of the late renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, who famously murdered his wife
and her lover in 1590. He'd originally intended to compose an opera specifically about
that historical event, before discovering that Alfred Schnittke was just completing his
own Gesualdo opera. He therefore made his own work much less specific, paring down
the text, taking out "what feels like literature" to produce the extraordinary patchwork
of half articulated, half implied exchanges that gives the 70-minute piece much of its
powerfully mysterious charge.

Music Theatre Wales rehearsing The Killing Flower.

In the 1980s he'd devised a way of setting words by having them sung on a slow
glissando that preserved the microtonal inflections of speaking. "When a singer speaks
onstage, it's usually very embarrassing, but we must always find something that hasn't
existed before. . . the problem is that we must represent the tragedy and not become the
tragedy ourselves." Using such techniques he came up with something that was much
more ambiguous, a dramatic framework that was far removed from opera as it had
developed over the last three centuries. If Sciarrino's music theatre has antecedents at
all, they are to be found right back in Monteverdi; he admits that seeing a performance
of Il Coronazione di Poppea as a teenager left a deep impression.

His most recent opera, Superflumina, received its premiere three years ago, but ideas for
at least two new ones are slowly maturing. "It's not difficult to find the subjects, I have
many that I haven't tackled yet." But his ambitions go much further than that: "I want to
find a new solution to music theatre; if we don't find one, we are dead and our culture is
dead. Any kind of theatre now has to be conditioned by cinema, and by its way of
editing. The composer is no longer at the centre of things, now the connections are made
by the listener. But my problem really is that I want to change the world."

* The Killing Flower opens at Buxton Opera House (0845 127 2190) on 16 July, and tours to
Cardiff, London, Llandudno and Swansea from 18 October.

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