Italo Calvino

Harvard lectures (1985)

Musik Thomas Fortmann

Libretto Stefano Adami

The project to create a musical opus inspired by Italo Calvino's Harvard Lectures arose from the meeting between Thomas Fortmann and Professor Stefano Adami, a scholar of the life and work of the great Italian writer. The two collaborators started from the need that it is by now appropriate to celebrate Calvino's near centenary through forms, ways and languages of expression that are not always the traditional ones of conventions, conferences and scholar days, but instead using different languages to remember what was one of the greatest experimenters of the world literary 20th century. 

Thus, was born the idea of developing a work that would set to music the various chapters of the so-called "Lezioni americane”. 

It is well known, in fact, that Calvino wrote the Lectures at the request of Harvard University in the summer of 1985, as a kind of literary, philosophical and cultural guide that humanity needed to take with it as it entered the Third Millennium. This guide was articulated, according to Calvino, on the six fundamental values that would be needed in the new age. Values that concern not only literature, but in the same way also music. Indeed, the composition is an attempt to trace the corresponding musical parallels of the parameters of each lesson. And the texts of the vocal passages are made up of the significant literary examples that Calvin offers.

So, the idea of a "literary concert" arises from the isolation of key passages from each of the six chapters and from the most significant literary examples that Calvino records. Through the musical correspondences in which the texts are recited or sung, this results in a new reading of the work that Calvino conceived as a kind of inheritance and was unable to complete due to his illness, which led to his untimely death in mid-September 1985.

Content „Lezione americane“ - Harvard Lectures

“Six Memos for the Next Millennium” for the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Series at Harvard University. The lectures outline six values Calvino wished to recommend to the approaching new millennium. He intended to devote one lecture to each of six qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. Though he completed the first five, he died before finishing the last.

 

Calvino’s first memo is on the subject of “Lightness”; he opens with this topic because it is the one dearest to his heart. “Lightness” is several things to Calvino. First, it is a working method: “I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all, I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.” Second, lightness is a worldview, a philosophical position, something like the pagan naturalism of Lucretius and Ovid. Third, it is a quality “arising from the writing itself,” completely independent of the writer’s philosophical position. Lastly—and most relevantly for the coming millennium—lightness is a way of thinking, a way of rising above the noise of life. Calvino considers the history of literature through the prism of “lightness,” arguing that “two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better…. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things.” 

The second Memo concerns “Quickness.” Calvino stresses that he is not referring to narrative pace, which can be “delaying, cyclic, or motionless.” Rather, quickness is a species of lightness: “agility, mobility, and ease, all qualities that go with writing where it is natural to digress, to jump from one subject to another, to lose the thread a hundred times and find it again after a hundred more twists and turns.” Although Calvino is writing in the 1980s, prior to the rise of computer-based communications, he presciently argues that in the era of “fantastically speedy, widespread media,” speediness in literature will serve the vital purpose of “communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.”

The third memo, on Exactitude, begins appropriately with an exact definition: “To my mind, exactitude means three things above all: (1) a well-defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question; (2) an evocation of clear, incisive, memorable visual images; (3) a language as precise as possible both in choice of words and in expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination.

Calvino celebrates exactness of style, pointing out that even the most apparently ornate writers (such as Joyce and Nabokov) seek exact forms of expression. However, Calvino is more interested in the forms of exactness that characterize his own work: the use of logical, numerical, or geometrical systems to structure a work.

The memo on “Visibility” again discusses the threat of modern media: “If I have included visibility in my list of values to be saved, it is to give warning of the danger we run in losing a basic human faculty: the power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing forth forms and colors from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact of thinking in terms of images.” Calvino worries that the imaginative faculty to create mental pictures is threatened by the growing prevalence of pre-packaged imagery.

In his memo on “Multiplicity,” Calvino argue that in most fields excessive ambition is just that: excessive. In literature, however, excessive ambition is an essential part of the project: “Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.” For Calvino, this will require “Multiplicity” in the coming era because of science’s tendency to create “sectorial and specialized” knowledge. Multiplicity can represent our experience, but also reconcile its separateness into something whole.

Italo Calvino is widely recognized as one of the most important twentieth-century writers. 

video TRAILER, 7 min.

Opera popolare o quasi

Pia de' Tolomei

The popular legends transmitted by Sestini and Moroni in "Ottava Rima", Donizetti's opera and the cinematography of the mid-twentieth century tell us a melodramatic story anchored in a nineteenth century vision. 

In dealing with this subject we have adhered to an interpretation faithful to the original, closely linked to the few verses of the divine comedy and based on rigorous and modern historical research, which also reveals a much more dramatic drama than the traditional legends.

music TRAILER, 18 min.

music Thomas Fortmann

libretto various artists

drama Bruno Gaudieri

director Francesco Tarsi, Caterina Genta

conductor Massimo Merone

scenery Francesca Bizzarri & Jochen Meyder

Sopran

Federica Raja  (Pia de’ Tolomei) 

Mezzosopran 

Simona Bertini (Margherita Aldobrandeschi)

Tenor

Daniele De Prosperi  (Nello Pannocchieschi)

Baritono

Andrea Rola (Tollo degli Alberti di Prata / Ghino)

L’Accademia Amiata Ensemble: 

Jana Hildebrandt (flute)

Antonio Galella (clarinet)

Davide Vallini (saxophone)

Gigi Dalicandro (trumpet)

Ettore Candela (piano)

Claudio Cavalieri (violin)

Laura Gorkoff (violoncello)

Riccardo Cavalieri (guitar)

Carlo Bellucci (bass)

Federico Poli (drums & perc.)

Valter Neri (audio engineer)

ad lib. amateur choir

project management: Associazione Polis 2001