Maderna’s music at Teatro Malibran The Fenice Theatre Foundation, who also manage the Malibran Theatre, produced a new staging of Bruno Maderna’s Satyricon, an opera debuting on January 25, 2023 and playing every day until the 29. Coincidentally, January 27 will also be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birthday. They have something in common, Mozart and Maderna: both enfants prodigies, both of genius mind, amazing talent, and deep humanity. Alas, both passed young and disregarded right after by their contemporaries. It is said that Mozart’s body ended up in a mass grave. Maderna was forgotten right after his death for political reasons. If we scan through Maderna’s professional and artistic life, setting aside his tireless commitment to excellent orchestra conduction, we realize that he was there in all the key moments of recent musical history: reconstruction, renovation, detachment from totalitarian ideology.
Maderna had an essential role in the Darmstadt School, which influenced so strongly the international world of classical music, and built new, diverse musical languages and perspectives. He had a profound knowledge of history, and also worked in phonology (in Milan, with Luciano Berio), electronics, random-generated music, dodecaphonic serial composition. His presence – his immediacy, vision, and cultural and historical awareness – was a generous one. From his correspondence: “I maintain the serial principle as the essential principle of modern music. It is the only one that can seriously oppose the tonal principle and the only one that can make a complete linguistic synthesis come to fruition. We can manipulate naturally and freely, and live in it fully, much like the Flemish lived their expressive principles.” Satyricon will be the last piece of the Maderna programme, a beautiful example of lucidity and of the awareness of a recurring, cyclic, essentially apocalyptical phase in the history of human civilizations. A depth that is proper of sacred cultural traditions.
