Cast
Giacomo Manzoni
Program notes
Giacomo Manzoni on Quanta oscura selva trovai:
"In the things I've written in the past, I could say that this aspect of madness often emerges, this losing control. I've set to music words that Hölderlin wrote when the madness was beginning to take over; now I'm composing something for texts by Artaud and I've composed something for texts by Nietzsche.
I don't really know why but I'm fascinated, perhaps because I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm very instinctively interested in that moment when a person loses control of self, of rationality. The moment you shift from one state to another, when you lose any hold on reality and slip into madness, which may be total or only relative. In Hölderlin's case there were always ups and downs. With Nietzsche it was something devastating, as it was with Adrian Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus."
"This piece is called "Quanta oscura selva trovai" ["Such a dark wood I found"]. It came into being a year and a half ago as stage music for Dante's Inferno at Ravenna where they performed the three canticas – Paradise, Purgatory and Hell. When I approached this work I immediately realised it was an important piece and I already began to think in terms of a subsequent concert version with trombone, chorus and live electronics."
"The texts are freely adapted from "Inferno." Plus some fragments of Latin prose, also by Dante, and some of his contemporaries. But it gets a little crushed in the choral and electronic whole. There's an extra dialogue recited by the trombonist himself and commented simultaneously on his trombone and this is the dialogue, again from "Inferno," giving the musician the opportunity also to be a vocal performer."