A 15-kilo rose
Ingo Metzmacher describes Filidei's work as a solid, structured score, in which the deeply illustrative music follows every word of the text with surprising sound images and timbres.
Ingo Metzmacher is very familiar with contemporary music and opera. Before devoting himself to conducting, he was a pianist with the Ensemble Modern. He then served as General Director of the Hamburg State Opera and the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam. He has also written two books that attest to this dual passion: Keine Angst vor neuen Tönen (Don't Be Afraid of New Sounds, 2005) and Vorhang auf! Oper entdecken und erleben (Raise the Curtain! Discover and Experience Opera, 2009). He has conducted (and partly recorded) works from the 20th century, such as Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the District of Mcensk, Enescu's Oedipe and Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten. But his repertoire also includes works by Luigi Nono (Intolleranza 1960, Al gran sole carico d'amore, Prometeo) and Wolfgang Rihm (Jakob Lenz, Die Eroberung von Mexico, Dionysos. The latter premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2010), Saint François d'Assise by Olivier Messiaen and Gawain by Harrison Birtwistle, and world premieres ranging from Die Weiden by Johannes Maria Staud (Vienna, 2018) to Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose) by Francesco Filidei.
GM It is heavy this Rose?
IM Ah yes, very heavy! A 15-kilogram score, the heaviest I have ever held in my hands. I had to buy a special suitcase to carry it around.
GM Had you already conducted music by Francesco Filidei?
IM No. Conducting Il nome della rosa is my first experience with his music. But I had already heard his opera Giordano Bruno many years ago, and I found it very interesting.
GM What elements of this score stood out most to you? From the perspective of a conductor like yourself, who is well versed in contemporary repertoire, what are the most innovative aspects of this piece?
IM It was the orchestral part that struck me most. His art of instrumentation is truly fascinating. You could call it ‘illustrative’ music, but not in a derogatory sense, because it is music that follows the text in every detail. With sound and timbral images that emerge in coincidence with every word of the libretto: if someone mentions a horse, you hear a kind of neighing in the orchestra. There are very explicit and obvious things like this, but also others that are more hidden, not immediately perceptible, but everything is interwoven with great subtlety. It is a complex and rich score, with many different elements, materials and styles, which change in every scene, but often alternate and overlap even within the same scene, sometimes changing almost every bar. It is a real challenge to hold all these elements together. But they exist within a very solid structure, throughout the entire opera. I really like how the score is organised. It has a clear structure, which is shaped like a rose from a tonal point of view, a mirror image that moves outwards, expanding the tonalities towards the centre and then returning to the initial note. It is a very sophisticated structure, the result of extensive study.
GM This fractal structure, with its two chromatic scales that intersect, diverging in the first movement and converging in the second, is very clear when analysing the score. But does it also work when listening to it?
IM Yes, absolutely. And it's a necessary element when you think about creating a piece based on such a great novel, so developed, rich in characters, situations and symbolic elements. I read it twice, and each time I discovered something new. But what do you do if you decide to write an opera based on a novel like this? You need to transpose it into a musical image. And that's what Filidei has done. It's a bit like in the Renaissance, when people tried to transpose words into music. That's the crux of the matter. And I think that in Filidei's work, this transposition works very well. When I first looked at the score, I didn't understand all this yet. Now that I've been working on it for a few months, I think everything will be clear and supported by this geometric structure that is at the heart of the work.
GM This work features many choral scenes, but also many arias, each different for each character. Do you think there is more melos than, for example, in Giordano Bruno?
IM All the music in Il nome della rosa reflects the fact that the story is set in the Middle Ages, and it is no coincidence that the vocal parts of the various characters always refer to the melodic style typical of Gregorian chant. But this melos reaches our ears with different, very contemporary sounds, above all because it is always accompanied by an orchestration that doubles the vocal lines with ever-changing instruments, enveloping them in elaborate harmonies and imbuing them with particular colours and unexpected atmospheres. The modernity lies more in the orchestral part than in the singing. The orchestra changes the colour and form of the vocal parts. Always. And each scene is different from all the others, with its own colour and structure. There is also a huge choir, which sings from the Prologue, where there are some hints, like flashes, of the story being told. But then it also appears in the first scene, ‘Il portale’ (The Portal), a truly incredible scene. The composer has transposed the images of this church portal into music, and the result is a grandiose and overwhelming orchestral and choral piece.
GM Some pages of the work, such as this one, recall Messiaen, a composer you know very well, having also conducted his opera Saint François d'Assise. The love duet between Adso and the girl at the end of the first act, with their intertwining vocalisations, also recalls Messiaen's bird songs. Don't you think?
IM There are several points that recall Messiaen, in the use of harmonies, the instrumental blocks, the orchestral setting. There are some influences from Messiaen, yes, absolutely. But birds didn't come to mind. The scene at the end of the first act is a real love scene, very carnal, and their vocalisations are more reminiscent of an orgasm than birdsong. It's a beautiful scene!
GM Francesco Filidei is a composer who knows how to extract music even from noises, bird calls and everyday objects such as balloons or toilet rolls. Are there any noisy scenes in this piece?
IM Yes. The score calls for a huge percussion set, and the percussionists have to do a lot of things, using various objects, not just instruments: for example, stones, hunting tools, animal imitations, and then cymbals, crockery, glasses, glass bottles. This is especially true in the kitchen scenes. As I said before, the music always tends to illustrate the scene, so it was logical to use kitchen objects for that scene. Filidei worked a lot with colour, which is very different in each scene, with a wide variety of sounds. However, it is not trivial descriptivism, it is not ‘film music’, because there are always two elements interacting: on the one hand, you have the very clear structure of the entire piece, with a different tonality and different musical characters, and on the other, you have this ‘illustrative’ colour that serves to emphasise the setting of an entire scene, but also, as I said, a single word, a reference to a fact or a character.
GM So it's the shape of the rose that holds everything together?
IM Yes, everything revolves around it. Although the symbolism of the rose remains a mystery, only the name of the original rose remains. But starting from the rose, Filidei has created a real musical structure, which is very fascinating.
GM What was the last contemporary piece you conducted before Il nome della Rosa? And what will you be conducting in the near future?
IM A few years ago, I conducted Luigi Nono's Intolleranza 1960 at the Salzburg Festival. Next season, I will be conducting Philip Glass's Satyagraha in Paris.
GM So Filidei sits between Nono and Glass?
IM Yes, that’s true… very interesting.
Gianluigi Mattietti
An expert in contemporary musical theatre, Gianluigi has taught composition at the Conservatory of Cagliari and is a lecturer in music history at the University of Cagliari. He has published monographs and essays on various analytical and theoretical aspects of 20th and 21st century music. He is vice-president of the National Association of Music Critics.