DANGEROUS LIAISONS

Musical reading freely based on Cavalleria Rusticana
Mascagni Festival / AidaStudioProduzioni Production
Santuzza Stefania Sandrelli, Soprano Tso Hanying, Piano Rocco Rey Ruina, Dramaturgy Debora Pioli
Mise en scene by Marco Voleri

With this reading the whole story of Cavalleria Rusticana is read from Santuzza’s perspective. In her lives the pride of wounded and betrayed love, the desperation of a woman who feels she has lost her man, the darkness of a day without sun, the fear of having lost happiness forever. But Santuzza is not driven by a passive feeling, she is fueled by extreme determination, she is not a woman who remains silent, who cries in silence.

She is a woman endowed with a wealth of emotions and a vital force of absolute rarity. She is a woman who denounces, she is a woman who is not driven by desires of revenge, but of justice.

The combination of these characteristics delivers to the opera stage a unique character, far from any model, in which we recognize more than in any other the signs of novelty that belong to Cavalleria Rusticana and to Mascagni’s female universe.

With this reading it is intended to reveal how Cavalleria Rusticana is not a drama of jealousy or a genre picture, there is something important that, read today, goes beyond the scheme of the beloved adulterous triangle so dear to bourgeois drama: there is an important work on the woman, there is a devastating force that brings on stage an inner tragedy, one that leaves no escape, one that represents, without possible solutions or accommodations, the lacerations of a sadly still alive male chauvinist mentality.

It is a tragedy that is very contemporary: Santuzza is a woman who is forced to assert herself through patriarchal rules and uses them to her advantage thus redeeming her honor because in a community that condemns her, it is the only way to regain a role and not be marginalized.

Many of the homicides and femicides we read about every day still arise from situations like these, from the drama of female loneliness, from the protection of male honor, incredibly alive even today.

The message of this reading that gives voice to Santuzza, to the woman who does not intend to suffer and to her inner world, is a strong message: it is necessary to fight stereotypes and prejudices, denounce injustices, treat men and women equally. Even today, many of the violence within relationships can be ascribed to the increasing inability of some men to find an interposition between frustrations and lack of possession. In a context where women are progressively asserting their identity and role, men struggle to find a balance between desire and higher law. We observe men’s inability to interpret this paradigm shift: mine or no one, is the crazy belief that opens the abyss of violence. Let us learn from Santuzza the courage to denounce and not to submit to men’s choices but let us do it away from the rules of patriarchy.