Media opera

‘A riveder le stelle’ between virtual scene and television direction

Abstract

If the need for a media approach to the history of opera is now acknowledged, the urgent question today does not exclusively concern the forms of re-proposing the opera scene through other media, but rather the reinvention of that same scene in function of new media devices, as well as new dramaturgical and production requirements. The consolidated tendency towards explicit multimedia grafts, useful to ‘expand’ the boundaries of the represented space and reformulate the relationship between environments and expressive codes, has undergone a strong acceleration as a result of the pandemic crisis, leading to the recovery of formats such as the film-opera (think of Martone’s double investment with Il Barbiere di Siviglia and La Traviata for the Teatro d’Opera in Rome) and the reconfiguration of the modules of television direction. Among the various experiments in the reconfiguration of the opera A riveder le stelle by Davide Livermore (conducted by Riccardo Chailly) acts on a double level and probably represents the most peculiar case in terms of spatial dimension. In fact, the first axis on which the architecture of the performance rests concerns the balance between the lost physicality of the Piermarini (the stage, the stalls inhabited by the orchestra, the boxes, the foyer, etc.) and the digital sets of D-Wok, capable of supporting – thanks to calibrated effects – the weight of the dramaturgy; the second level sublimates the wound of the empty theatre through the joints of the television direction, which thus becomes the medium of an innovative diegetic transition and in fact a unique place of spectacular composition and fruition. The proposal presented here intends to explore the impact of multimedia codes on the re-functionalisation of the stage space in A riveder le stelle, with specific references to the interactions between bodies and media practices.