“get Up!”, to whisper to me, my Italian seatmate, “the President!” Then we stand between all the premiere guests in the dark, silent Theater. Staring at the shadows of the Royal box. Wait. A headlight goes, the President goes over to the balustrade.
applaud people. And now for something to happen. The time it will take a polite round of applause, it’s over, people clap. The time for a big round of applause is over, the people clapping. Occasionally, Shouts of, “bravo!”, “viva il Presidente!”. After three minutes, the orchestra is finally the Italian anthem. It was created on the eve of the revolutionary year of 1848, some in the audience sing: “brothers, the father of the country woke up.”
Each in the Theater, it is clear what this means. Sergio Mattarella, for almost four years in office, forms to civilian use. On respect for the Constitution and against the European Union. After the parliamentary elections in the spring of the populist demanded his resignation. Part of the attacks were hurtful – Mattarella had a brother who was going on as the Sicilian Prime Minister against the Mafia. He lost it by a murder; not many pay such a price for the principles of the Republic. The demonstrative applause is a Protest against the government. A Protest of the bourgeois and of the bourgeois of Milan, against the populist Rome. So that the can articulate, is the state President in the Scala on “the most important premiere night of the world”.
North of the Alps, refers to the theatre as a place for public discourse. In Milan, the Opera house serves as a Symbol. Enormous resources are thrown for this evening on the stage to guide the city and the world an image of Italy which you think is equally ideal as desirable, sensual indulgence-rich and full of passion, which is politically United and compact. Of course, there is no Italy. It is the Italy project, the Patriotic and nationalist fantasies retroactive to the Risorgimento, on the contradictory, for the entirety of the population is not representative of the process of the emergence of the Nation. He is found in 1861 with the proclamation of the Italian Kingdom, with a first culmination point, but is not completed until today, on the contrary: The produced in Italy was determined by the nobles, and Formed mainly from the North of Italy. This is probably one of the deeper reasons for that doubt is today in the interest of “the elites” to the common good, that “the people” does not carry the concept of state of competence identified.
The fantasy of this so powerful and rousing the Nation to explain why the Scala, opened its time-consuming with a series of operas, the aesthetic of the first rank. Elsewhere you would make on a space accessible to the public. At the Scala you will be billed as “Italian operas” into the window. Your music is absolutised, your roots are concealed in a mostly French-influenced dramaturgy and the European life of the materials, the composer, without compelling evidence to the nation-building incorporated.
The fascination of Italy is now part of that 7. December, the day of Milan’s St. Ambrose, in the ideal Italy of the stage, while the audience and the President of the Republic acting out the social divide in the audience. State theatre and Opera fall into one. The music of Giuseppe Verdi, by aroused irresistible, the feelings, the ideal of Italy to rise, and in doing so, you, think, all, all takes.
For Verdi’s Opera “Attila”, 1846, written for Venice, it means two things. Who is liable for the early Verdi, or a noise night interested in, which will be held in Milan, a very, very well-made production. More spectacular than the film’s Director, Davide Livermore and the Milan-based Designer collective Giò Forma, you can realize the concept of singing on the ramp, barely – horses, monks, soldiers (a bit early Soviets, a bit of fascism), burning cities, partisans, Sadomaso-mates, crushing walls with Roman letters. Great and amazing the electronic animations of the “meeting of Leo the Great with Attila”, Raphael’s fresco, produced by the Italian Video-Designer of D-Wok.
