The Betrothed: a love story, apparently ...

As part of the celebrations to mark 150 years since the unification of Italy, this performance seeks to bring together the words of Alessandro Manzoni, the best-known writer of united Italy, with music by some of the leading contemporary composers, to present a world to us which is still our own, a world which, with all its virtues, vices and contradictions, is still able to move us.

 

The readings are from chapters VI, VIII, XII, XXI, XXXIV and XXXVIII of Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed. The challenge here is twofold: first, to allow figures such as Don Rodrigo, Padre Cristoforo, Lucia, the Unnamed, Renzo, and the people of Milan to take centre stage, as though characters in a Shakespearian drama, each of them struggling with themselves first and foremost; second, to show how the language of Manzoni, even without divine providence, to this day remains choral, controversial, poetic, theatrical, and astonishingly relevant – indeed, perhaps more so now than ever before.

This blend of words, dance and music teases out the golden thread running through the novel, which is the author’s gaze – implacable, yet at the same time implicated – through which mankind is observed in its transformation from individual to collective, showing the way in which the story of each of us, whether consciously or unconsciously, is the story of us all.

The plot – in a nutshell

In the seventeenth century, beneath the mountains surrounding Lake Como in Northern Italy, a young couple on the eve of their wedding discover that the local tyrant has designs on the girl. While famine and plague decimate an exploited, oppressed people, their story takes on Shakespearian overtones. Lucia becomes acquainted with the horrors of abduction and imprisonment, Renzo with the anguish of condemnation and exile. A happy ending? Possibly. But what is for sure, is that the end of the plague, the young couple’s marriage and the merest hint of their later life, inspired a whole nation to ask questions of its present, and imagine that different future might be possible.

First performed (reading): Milan, La Scala, 25th January, 2010