First showing of “La madre del Mostro” July 8 and 9, 2007

First showing on stage at the Teatro dei Rozzi on July 8th and 9th (ore 9:15 pm) for “La madre del mostro”, music by Fabio Vacchi, text by the journalist and writer Michele Serra and directed by Denis Krief, commissioned by the Accademia Musicale Chigiana – always with special focus on contemporary music – and set up in collaboration with the Orchestra della Toscana, under the direction of Claire Gibault della Toscana; soloists Gabriella Sborgi (The Mother), Danilo Formaggia (The Father), Bruno Taddia (The antenna installer) and Guido Loconsolo. (The monster). The opera, that will be broadcast live on July 8th by Rai-Radio Tre, is inspired by real life facts and daily life, by the media power of television, to the world of football and violence in the stadiums, all represented in a tragic-grotesque style.


“La Madre del mostro” is a tragedy that takes place inside the family, through the voice of the television that announces to the parents of a son that he has died during an outbreak of violence at the stadium.  I wrote the libretto without posing any problem of dimension, taking advantage of  melodrama as a concentrate of any type of passion, eagerness, contrast, sentiment.  I just a few lines I went from a funeral lament to parody, from satirical paradox to pain.  There was no reserve in what was written.
In fact, I had no reserve even when I accepted to the proposal made by Fabio Vacchi to write an opera libretto for him.  I had no specific culture, especially musical, and so I depended on my experiences, fortunately many, as a theatrical writer, setting up a sort of small and whirling concentrate of dramaturgical situation.  Once I was in the arena, the only thing I could do is face the bull with my bare hands.  I hope that Vacchi, when he says he is happy to have put my story into music, is not only saying this out of human kindness. 
(Michele Serra for Ricordi National Committee)

Michele Serra, in his first libretto for a musical opera, tells about a “middle-aged couple that lives in a middle-class house. The television (represented by the choir) is the main contact with the outside world: a badly tolerated contact but very intrusive. The couple has a son, The Monster, an ultra fan who speaks with the high-sounding and bombastic language typical of wartime rhetoric”. The television will follow the life of this family, announcing the tragic death of the son live. “Television cooks and re-cooks the outside world – said director Denis Krief in his third collaboration with the Accademia Musicale Chigiana after the first two opera “Le congiurate di Schubert “(2004) and “Il ritorno da lontano di Mendelssohn” (2005) -, because people can be fed by television sitting comfortably in their own home, just like the characters in our opera. If does not matter if what is shown has no relation with reality or if we end up not believing our eyes”.

Fabio Vacchi, one of the most important Italian and European composers of the present musical scene, does not belong to any particular school nor does he have any particular tendency, but he distinguishes himself because of his extremely personal style that can easily be distinguished and recognized thanks to a careful interaction of harmonic, structural and timbre choices; with special attention given always to the issues of real life, his was the Diary of Disdain written on the wave of emotions caused by the events of September 11th, directed by Muti with the Scala Philharmonic in 2002, another work was Dai calanchi di Sabbiuno, composed for a commemorative concert for the 50th anniversary of the Resistance (Scala, 1995) and executed more than one-hundred times all over the world. The writer of music for movies, his important collaboration with Ermanno Olmi includes soundtracks for the movie “Il mestiere delle armi” (David di Donatello award for the best soundtrack in 2002) and the recent movie “Centochiodi”. From a musical point of view, with regards to “La madre del mostro”, Vacchi says: “for some time I have been feeling the need to find a point of encounter, in composing, between the reception and re-elaboration of different stimuli and the need to combine them in a unified and rigorous way. The studies I have made since I was young of popular musical cultures are coming out at a creative level in a stronger and stronger way.” This is how the music for La madre del mostro (one act divided into eight scenes) was created, where in some passages rigorously atonal material becomes alive with ethnic patrimony, sometimes in a hidden manner, sometimes in a clearly evident manner like in the second scene entirely constructed in a Sardinian song: all this in a weave full of references to the important opera tradition that has in Niccolò (The Monster) the expression of nineteenth-century melodrama rhetoric.


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