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IL R I TOR NO D’U LIS SE IN PAT R I A

SYNOPSIS PROLOGUE Human Frailty is subject to Time, Fortune and Cupid.

PART 1 Penelope has been waiting for twenty years for the return of her husband, lost after the Trojan War. Ericleia, Ulysses’ old nurse, is convinced that he will return. The maid Melantho has fallen in love with Eurimachus, one of Penelope’s suitors. Eurimachus presses her to open Penelope’s “heart of diamond” to love again. Against Neptune’s command, the Phæacians have brought Ulysses, his mortal enemy, to Ithaca. Neptune rails against human boldness in rejecting belief in the gods and Fate. Jupiter allows Neptune to revenge himself on the Phæacians. Ulysses wakes in Ithaca, but does not recognize his homeland. He curses sleep, himself and the apparently faithless Phæacians. The goddess Minerva appears. To complete her revenge after the fall of Troy, she intends to restore Ulysses as ruler. She reveals her plan to him. Melantho describes the pleasures of love to Penelope. Eumæus throws Irus out of his tavern, as he is unable to pay his tab. Eumæus does not recognize the disguised Ulysses as he returns. Minerva brings Telemachus, son of Ulysses and Penelope, to Ithaca and confronts him with his father, who he never had time to get to know. Previous pages: GEORG NIGL as ULISSE ANDREA MASTRONI as ANTINOO KATE LINDSEY as PENELOPE

SYNOPSIS

The three suitors Antinous, Eurimachus and Peisander harass Penelope. Eumæus reports the return of Telemachus and possible impending return of Ulysses. The suitors resolve to hasten a new wedding for Penelope with lavish gifts. Minerva conceives the plan for Ulysses to settle with the suitors.

PART 2 Telemachus plagues his mother with a declaration of love for the fair Helen, who shares in the guilt for the Trojan War. There is a trial of strength in Eumæus’s tavern between the unrecognized Ulysses and Irus. The suitors present their gifts to Penelope. She responds by challenging them to a trial with the bow. The one who can draw Ulysses’ bow will be rewarded with his wife and his kingdom. The three suitors fail, and only the disguised Ulysses manages to draw the bow, with the help of the gods. He uses it to kill the three suitors. Irus kills himself. Penelope refuses to recognize the murderer as her husband. Minerva, Juno and Jupiter persuade Neptune to abandon his revenge on Ulysses. Penelope feels a spark in the stranger of the Ulysses who left her to go to war twenty years before.

ANDREAS LÁNG IN AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSSI WIELER & SERGIO MORABITO

AN EXTREMELY MULTILAYERED WORK al

The Odyssey is part of human mythology. How far do you as a team of directors lead this myth together with what Monteverdi and librettist Badoaro have created in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria? sm Myth isn’t an exclusively positive term. We still live in mythical times, because our human fragility is subject to irrational powers and forces. We see making myths transparent as part of our modern experience as a central motive in our work in theatre. Which is what the ancient tragedians did in putting widely known mythical relationships on the stage to desacralise them and make them transparent for their own times and their needs and conflicts. It’s a matter of reflecting our fears, needs, pain and hopes in the cultural myths that have been handed down. jw For this opera, Monteverdi and Badoaro have chosen their very own perspective on the traditional hero story, which directs our attention to

human vulnerability. The prologue precedes the action in which all the characters – humans or gods – are fragile and carry big question marks. Naturally, you have Homer’s narrative at the back of your mind when you’re working, there’s no way around it, but the decisive thing is that in the opera this isn’t simply repeated but explored for its contradictions and potential pain. We should not fall into the error of understanding mythical events familiar to us from their outcome – as it were, the wrong way round – but note the steady flow of gaps and breaks in the presumed continuity of the events. al The opera is called Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria – there seems to be a particular focus on the word “ritorno.” Why this complicated title, why not simply Ulisse? jw It’s very striking. This describes an opera which isn’t that short, and which is all about simply the moment of return of the title figure and his reunion with his wife, Penelope. The focus isn’t

AN EXTREMELY MULTILAYERED WORK

on the previous years which are the basis of his famed heroic status, but only on the final step he has to take after he’s already arrived at his home at the beginning. Who is Ulysses at this point in his life? In the twenty years of his absence – ten years of war, ten years of wandering – he’s not only aged, but also been changed by his deeds and misdeeds. His wanderings, and also his failure to recognise his home at the start of the opera must be understood in an existential sense. He may have landed in Ithaca physically, but he has become strange and incomprehensible to himself. His home is in a way the mirror where he can perceive the difference in himself. This is why he hesitates after his encounter with his son Telemachus to go to Penelope with him, which would have been the most human and obvious reaction. A psychologist would talk about guilty feelings here which hold him back. sm This non-identity of Ulysses will also plague Penelope until the finale of the piece. In Homer she is almost a marginal figure, she is considerably upgraded in the opera. Her plaintive monologue at the start of the first act is also an initial high point. We see a woman who is deeply wounded and traumatised in her inmost being, who feels Ulysses’ long absence as a betrayal of love. Penelope rejects the suitors, because she doesn’t want to experience another comparable emotional hurt. This also shows the greatness of a love which cannot heal. This is another reason why she takes so long to recognise her husband in the homecomer, who has become a different person to the one she loved. jw Recognise is the important word. She sees that he is Ulysses at first

glance. When he turns her suitors into a bloodbath, she witnesses his warriorlike coarsening and brutalisation. The alienation between the two is explored in appropriately nuanced terms in all its ramifications, including musically. al Are we looking at a happy ending to the opera? jw I think the work is too complex to break it down to a clear common thread. I’d prefer to talk about an open end. A return to the original relationship is impossible, but perhaps a new form of getting to know each other is – because they can’t simply strip out all the killings and traumatisation from body and soul. Perhaps they’ll be happy in a different way. al What makes this new alliance possible? sm It’s a question of how he tries in his despair about her rejection to formulate things in their encounter in the finale of the piece. You could mistakenly read his words as heroic. But in fact Ulysses tells Penelope that he’s a product of this war, a mortal who wanted to survive, although at the mercy of mythical powers. This confession of his own powerlessness together with his own guilt allows Penelope to reach out to him again. jw She feels – and we show this – that this is something like shucking off a shell, revealing a wound. However, this process is only made possible by singing a song. sm In fact, Penelope only abandons the recitative-like declamatory mode of expression at two points in the entire opera. We’re not looking at the operatic convention of later times in which the process of singing as such is no longer an issue. This gives the two moments we’re talking about par-

HANS-THIES LEHM ANN

THE HOMERIC WARRIOR The swell of the epos literally envelops bodies, people, things, events and discourse in a spate of evenly flowing hexameter. In his historical-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic, Lukács idealistically interpreted mythical-epic reality as a “blissfully existing totality of lifes”. However, this romantic projection fails to recognise that the unbrokenness of Homer’s heroes is an element of war: not only in the sense of the actual tumult of battle, but also because of the blindly accepted power system of a mythical compulsion, which, despite aesthetic elucidation thanks to Homer’s craft, reveals the pattern of insanity always inherent in unbrokenness. The Homeric warrior, whose pathos of honour easily drives him to overt madness when it is or seems to be violated, always exhibits latent madness that mani fests itself in blood-lust, excessive vengeance, mercilessness and petty quarrels. It is probably this raging of the warrior that gave us the real model for the mythical figure of the petrifying Gorgon which exaggerates it. The distorted face of the warrior, who is screaming and thirsting for bloody slaughter, the gaping mouth and the terrifying eyes heralding death, the flowing hair – all this indicates that the fighter is in the grip of the madness of war, the μένος. This irresistible obsession, beyond consciousness and individuality, has a paralysing, terrifying effect on the opponent.

GEORG NIGL as ULISSE