Maderna's Satyricon, or the postmodern before the postmodern

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Man does not live by Sanremo alone and so, to catch his breath in the rage of the Abbronzatissimo, we went to the Comunale in Bolzano, but in the small room of the Studio, for a new production of Satyricon by Bruno Maderna which, unlike many works of the Seventies, has not suffered that kind of unplanned obsolescence that has touched others. Indeed, it appears almost prophetic, as happens to creators so intelligent that they appear out of step with their time like Maderna.

Not having denied but having overcome avant-garde orthodoxy and serialist rigor, here the terminal Maderna practices postmodernism before the word was even invented. Therefore, the score as a collage, palimpsest, quotation of quotations, quotation squared, cubed, to the nth degree, where it begins with an almost Handel-esque chorus, then Lehár arrives, we arrive at Wagner, the musical appears, Till Eulenspiegel peeps out, echoes of Kurt Weill and fragments of Bizet wander, Gluck is sung literally and Tchaikovsky is deformed, and what is this? Oh yes, it is Musetta's waltz, while the prima donna shoots high notes like a Lucia di Lammermoor on acid, perhaps on a magnetic tape background.

A wonderful pre-postmodern smoothie, dizzying and disconcerting, high and low at the same time, and always with a fast pace, like a video clip . But, in fact, it is an opera: the winning choice is to have applied this variety of musical forms to Petronius' novel, which is in turn a continuous digression, and to the polyglot libretto that is drawn from it, which mixes Latin, English, French and German, building a "panel" dramaturgy that has no weaknesses. Even the obligatory social denunciations of bourgeois decadence and opulence, precisely in Seventy's style ("Jupiter is the bank account"), sound right, or at least not outrageously ideological.

Even more so because the show is of a high level, well directed by Tonino Battista with a Haydn Orchestra that allows you to appreciate the excellent quality of its first parts, almost all very exposed especially in the expressionist mockery. Manu Lalli's direction is quite cautious in the story of the expected orgiastic depravities but it works, very much on the music, with costumes like Fellini's Casanova, "serious" when necessary but always with the right amount of irony, and appropriate movements also by the boys from a local professional school, the Einaudi, involved in the production as a silent but participating chorus. Excellent, then, the company not only "lyrical", dominated by Marcello Nardis' Trimalcione who allows us to glimpse the truth of the man behind the caricature of the nouveau riche, whose death is therefore sinisterly moving, and of his wife Fortunata, Costanza Savarese, intense and delightful at the same time. But there is also a musical tenor with a beautiful voice, Joel O'Cangha. Lots of applause from the happy few in a small but almost full room, and then there was even time to go back to the hotel and see Duran Duran: but they are vintage, Maderna is contemporary .

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