L’ultima sera
Program note
L’Ultima sera [The final evening] for female voice and five instruments was written in 1980 in response to a commission from Radio-France.
The voice uses brief fragments pulled from works by Fernando Pessoa, recently translated into Italian. There are eight fragments, and it is the movements that form the composition. An equivalent figure to the text’s protagonist is found in the instrumental articulation of each movement. This equivalence is intended to integrate in the sense of a simultaneously overt and obscure madrigalism, to the point of being embedded in the overall newly-autonomous form.
As has happened in the past, the voice is an essential presence, however – being one instrument among others – it also shares a close complicity with the instruments. As an extension of these, it is the common thread that renders explicit without explicitly taking on the protagonist role of a soloist.
Franco Donatoni
Original texts
Texts : Fernando Pessoa
From Una sola moltitudine
I.
Mi raccontai nell'ombra, senza capirmi.
Oggi mi so il deserto, ov'ebbe Dio
un tempo la capitale dell'oblio…
(Stazioni della Via Crucis, X)
II.
Per ritornare a notte antica e calma,
come il paesaggio, quando il giorno muore.
(Abdicazione)
III. (il vento, là fuori.)
(senza titolo)
IV.
culliamo tutti tra le braccia un figlio morto
(Episodi, II)
V.
... straniero qui come dappertutto ...
(Lisbon Revisited)
VI.
...sii per me materna, oh notte tranquilla ...
(Passaggio delle ore)
VII.
il silenzio che s'accentua
al ronzio o al sussurro di un nonnulla nel buio ...
(Villeggiatura)
VIII.
... malato, e in un crepuscolo di spade,
morente fra bandiere sventolanti,
l'ultime sera di un impero in fiamme ...