Commissioned by Oper Frankfurt.
Libretto by Maria Stepanova, translated into German by Olga Radetzkaja
Sung in German with German & English surtitles
an introductory talk starts in the Holzfoyer 30 mins before performances begin, and will be available here and everywhere podcasts can be found shortly after opening night
The Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia is famous for her portraits of Sicilian women, who all had one thing in common: their loved ones were murdered by the Mafia.
A bloody war raged between rival Cosa nostra gangs in Palermo from the early 1970s till the 1990s. Scores of investigators, judges, high-ranking politicians and criminals from both sides were ruthlessly murdered. Headlines about killings appeared almost daily. Letizia Battalia (1935 – 2022), a press photographer, provided the pictures and joined the fight against the Mafia. Her photographs, shown in exhibitions around the world, became famous because, while chronicling events, they also conveyed a picture of life in those days, marked by poverty and patriarchal structures, making the suffering of mothers, daughters, and wives of murdered men even more palpable.
The Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti has dedicated this, her latest work, to them – following on from Inferno - world premiere, Oper Frankfurt 2021. Letizia Battalia is represented by a violist, who finds herself in a kind of afterlife. Bit by bit she finds out about the fate of women from Palermo, trying to come to terms with their memories in this realm of shadows. There's a »guide«, an interpreter and guardian, or maybe another victim of the Mafia. The libretto for this moving, poetic work about dark times in recent Italian history was written by the celebrated Russian author Maria Stepanova. Echoes of Euripides’ tragedy Trojan women and Dante’s Divine Comedy are heard, and research by the L’Ora newspaper, for which die Battalia worked.
