Elisa Haberer / OnP

Opera

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Cavalleria Rusticana /​ Sancta Susanna

Pietro Mascagni / Paul Hindemith

Opéra Bastille

from 30 November to 23 December 2016

Cavalleria Rusticana /​ Sancta Susanna

Opéra Bastille - from 30 November to 23 December 2016

Synopsis

"Oh Lola, red as the cherry in your milky white blouse…"  

Turiddu, prélude


A small village in Sicily, Easter Sunday. A despondent Santuzza searches for Turiddu, the man she loves. Before leaving for the army he was in love with Lola. But Santuzza, despite being married to Alfio, has won back Turiddu’s heart... In 1889, on Puccini’s advice, Pietro Mascagni chose to adapt one of Giovanni Verga’s plays for an opera composition competition. Mascagni won the prize and the first performance of the work was an unprecedented triumph for the 26-year-old composer. Numerous performances would follow and the saga of a small community of men and women slowly engulfed by an inexorable tragedy would quickly become a huge success all across Europe. Elīna Garanča and then Elena Zhidkova will lend their voices to the role of the heart-breaking Santuzza. 
Mario Martone has devised a new production of Paul Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna which is being presented in a double bill with his original La Scala production of Cavalleria rusticana. An opera from the composer’s early years, rediscovered in France in the early 2000s, Sancta Susanna is a profoundly expressionist work with several levels of interpretation. Klementia, who has been a nun for several years, is troubled by an apparition of Saint Susanna. The latter, performed by Anna Caterina Antonacci, lifts the veil on a carnal world she finds disturbing. Encouraged to confide by this awakening, Klementia recounts the passion of a young girl in the convent who many years before had stripped naked and embraced the body of Christ on the Cross. Darkness and light, life and death, body and soul all struggle and dialogue in this short, smouldering work in which the biblical figure of Susanna takes on an unparalleled psychological dimension.

Duration :

Artists

Melodramma in one act (1890)

After Giovanni Verga
In Italian

Creative team

  • opera logo
    Pietro Mascagni Music
  • opera logo
    Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti Libretto
  • opera logo
    Guido Menasci Libretto
  • Carlo Rizzi
    Carlo Rizzi Conductor
  • Mario Martone
    Mario Martone Director
  • opera logo
    Sergio Tramonti Set design
  • opera logo
    Ursula Patzak Costume design
  • opera logo
    Pasquale Mari Lighting design
  • opera logo
    Daniela Schiavone Assistant stage director
  • José Luis Basso
    José Luis Basso Chorus master

Opera in one act (1922)

In German

Creative team

  • opera logo
    Paul Hindemith Music (1895-1963)
  • opera logo
    August Stramm Libretto
  • Carlo Rizzi
    Carlo Rizzi Conductor
  • Mario Martone
    Mario Martone Director
  • opera logo
    Sergio Tramonti Set design
  • opera logo
    Ursula Patzak Costume design
  • opera logo
    Pasquale Mari Lighting design
  • opera logo
    Raffaella Giordano Choreography
  • José Luis Basso
    José Luis Basso Chorus master

Orchestre et Chœurs de l’Opéra national de Paris

Cavalleria rusticana : Production du Teatro alla Scala, Milan

French and English surtitles

Media

  • This is my body

    This is my body

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  • Podcast Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna

    Podcast Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna

    Listen the podcast

  • The Christ of Sancta Susanna

    The Christ of Sancta Susanna

    Read the article

  • "A sobriety both revealing and spectacular"

    "A sobriety both revealing and spectacular"

    Read the article

  • En Quête sur Sancta Susanna

    En Quête sur Sancta Susanna

    Listen the podcast

  • Mario Martone surprises the Bastille

    Mario Martone surprises the Bastille

    Read the article

© Palomar / Rai Cinema

This is my body

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Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna by Mario Martone

08 min

This is my body

By Simon Hatab, Farah Makki

The double bill of Cavalleria rusticana by Mascagni and Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna playing at the Paris Opera from November 29th to December 23rd, is an unexpected association. However, between the Sicilian tragedy and the mysterious fervour that leads a nun to kiss the body of Christ, director Mario Martone sees a common dramatic thread running through them both. Here he reveals the key ideas of his production.

As a sideline to your career as a film director, you have been staging operas for twenty-odd years. Do you consider opera as a sort of occasional excursion outside your main field or is there a continuous thread leading you from one art form to the other?

Mario Martone: In fact, music has always been present in my career. I started working when I was very young, in the late seventies. I was 17 or 18. At the time, I was part of an avant-garde group called Falso Movimento (False Movement). We organised visual and musical performances. One of my first performances in fact used the music of Verdi’s Otello, arranged by the America composer, Peter Gordon. The production was presented at the MaMa, the New York experimental art centre, before touring in various other countries… Cinema came into my life later, when I was about thirty. Soon after the turn of the century, I staged my first opera: Così fan tutte with Claudio Abbado. My career has been made up of lines, threads which, at a certain point, began to intersect: after that, in 2010, I made Noi Credevamo1 for which I used 19th century Italian music – Verdi, Rossini, Bellini… I was working on the interactions between Art and History, and Roberto Abbado conducted the Turin Orchestra. To return to your question, I would say then that I have always used music in my work but with great freedom. My artistic career is like an archipelago: my creations are distinct from each other, often far apart, but they end up intersecting each other after several years.

One of the features of the Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna evening is that the production of Cavalleria rusticana, which occupies the first half, is already in existence: you staged it in 2011 at La Scala Milan. But there it was followed by Pagliacci, as is often the case, according to operatic tradition. Can you say a few words on the creative process that led you to replace Leoncavallo’s work by that of Hindemith?

M.M.: When La Scala asked me to stage the diptych Cavalleria rusticana/Pagliacci, I hesitated for a long time. Italian Verismo is certainly not my favourite repertoire. There is something that disturbs me in its rhetoric. I finally took on the project when I realised that I could adopt an aesthetic of sobriety: rather than adding images I could take them out. In Cavalleria Rusticana, I thus decided to eliminate all the Sicilian folklore – the market place, the church bells, the farmers’ wagons…: everything that seemed to me to weigh down the drama and obscure its essence, which is that of a Greek tragedy. One mustn’t forget that before it became that picturesque world full of farm carts, Sicily was part of Ancient Greece. [laughs].

If we look at Cavalleria from that angle, the piece takes on a different meaning. I emptied the stage until I had this almost bare space in which the liturgical ritual, the Easter Mass, takes place [mentioned in the libretto]. This arrangement gives the chorus central importance. In focussing on the singers of the chorus, I wanted to return to the sacred dimension of the opera.

At that time, did you consider Cavalleria and Pagliacci as forming a single production?

M.M.: No, I thought of them as two completely different productions. I didn’t try to unify them through a single dramaturgical approach. In fact, for Pagliacci, the scenography was not sparse: it was filled with visual suggestivity.
My artistic career is like an archipelago: my creations are often far apart, but they end up intersecting each other. Mario Martone

When the Paris Opera asked you to restage your Cavalleria Rusticana, you abandoned Pagliacci in favour of Sancta Susanna. Clearly, the divorce between Mascagni and Leoncavallo wasn’t too painful since you have never conceived of these works as belonging together. But how did you envisage the new combination of Cavalleria and Hindemith’s opera?

M.M.: To understand the link between the two works, one must begin with my staging of Cavalleria, which is set in a church during the Easter mass. This mass takes place in front of an altar and a crucifix that visually dominates the tragedy. On that premise, my interpretation exacerbates the eroticism and the sensuality of the drama by interweaving them with the sacred. Cavalleria is a tragedy about passion and betrayal. It is self-abandon and exaltation of the senses that lead to the catastrophe. What I find interesting, personally, is this huge contrast that Mascagni draws out of Verga’s novella and dramatises: the composer underlines the sacred dimension very strongly – far more strongly than in Verga –and the contrast with the sensual dimension and bodily desire, with longing that must be satisfied in spite of everything and at any price creates an obvious link with Sancta Susanna. This articulation between the two works was born therefore, I think, out of my vision of Cavalleria Rusticana.

What creates continuity between Mascagni’s work and Hindemith’s is therefore a certain interweaving of desire with what is sacred?

M.M. Yes, at the beginning of Cavalleria we hear off-stage voices, that far-off song we imagine comes from the Sicilian countryside, redolent with the scent of oranges, luxuriant vines, blossoming myrtles and golden ears of wheat… They are just voices, an essential moment of opera, an instant of euphoria produced by the earth and the sun: a sort of pagan sensuality, a surrender to nature. In a certain way, Sancta Susanna takes up and amplifies this theme. Indeed, nature also plays an important role in Hindemith’s opera: the spring night, the perfume of the lilac, the bush behind which the gardener and the servant make love…
Mario Martone lors de la réalisation de « Leopardi Il giovane favoloso », 2015,  Collection Christophel
Mario Martone lors de la réalisation de « Leopardi Il giovane favoloso », 2015, Collection Christophel © Palomar / Rai Cinema

Between Mascagni’s late 19th century verismo and Hindemith’s German expressionism, how do you see the aesthetic rupture between the two works?

M.M.: The two operas effectively present a huge contrast. Whilst Cavalleria rusticana has a firm, horizontal narrative line, I see Sancta Susanna more as a vision, an expression emanating from within. In Hindemith’s opera, I tried to render visible on stage what Susanna was feeling within herself. But this contrast did not prevent me from weaving links between the two halves of the programme. First of all, there is the presence of the crucifix, which assures visual continuity. Furthermore, both works raise questions about our relationship with space: how does space open up? How does it retract? I play with these spatial expansions and retractions to find a certain rhythm.

The theme of spiritual devotion has been widely exploited by artists. Are there any painters that inspired you for Sancta Susanna?

M.M.: Yes, Giotto: at the beginning of the opera, Susanna’s cell is inspired by his very Italian vision, before the invention of perspective. But this inspiration is only visible at the beginning of the opera. Afterwards, everything explodes…

Interviewed by Simon Hatab and Farah Makki
Translated from the Italian by Farah Makki


1  Noi credevamo 2010 (We believed in English), set in 1828, recounts the struggle of two young Italian aristocrats in the Risorgimento, the unification of the Italian nation. The film was considered as "a new Guépard" a reference to Visconti’s film also on the subject of the Risorgimento.

Podcast Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna

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"Dance! Sing! 7 minutes at the Paris Opera" - by France Musique

07 min

Podcast Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna

By Judith Chaine, France Musique

  • In partnership with France Musique

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"Dance! Sing! 7 minutes at the Paris Opera" offers original incursions into the season thanks to broadcasts produced by France Musique and the Paris Opera. For each opera or ballet production, Judith Chaine (opera) and Stéphane Grant (dance), present the works and artists you are going to discover when you attend performances in our theatres.           

© Sergio Tramonti

The Christ of Sancta Susanna

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In the Opera studios

04 min

The Christ of Sancta Susanna

By José Sciuto

Playing alongside Cavalleria rusticana this season, Paul Hindemith’s smouldering opera Sancta Susanna, recounts the story of a young nun torn between morality and sensual desire. A turmoil embodied by the figure of Christ, to whom director Mario Martone wanted to give a spectacular appearance. José Sciuto, deputy director of the technical department and the artistic director of the Opera’s Studios, tells us about the conception of this particular component of the set.

“Without wanting to reveal all the surprises that Mario Martone has reserved for audiences in his production of Sancta Susanna, at a specific moment in the performance a monumental statue of Christ appears. The body is visible only as far as the pelvis. It evokes the burden of religious morality, intertwined with the themes of sensuality and sexuality which forms of the main themes of Mario Martone’s interpretation, both for Sancta Susanna and for “Cavalleria”.

The idea was to create the impression of sculpted and painted wood. We were inspired by a rather morbid, “suffering” Spanish Christ with droplets of blood trickling over his knees, similar to those found in the work of painter Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664) for example. The director also insisted that the nail be clearly visible to further emphasise the impression of suffering. He wanted the sculpture to look like an old crucifix from the 14th or 15th centuries. It had to seem to be in poor condition as if it had been manhandled, broken and patched up again.

Just as painters sometimes do, to better represent the appearance of the human body – irrespective of its state –, we used a “cut-away”, or a model which allowed us to study the appearance and connections of the muscles and joints.

Le Christ de Sancta Susanna - Dans les ateliers de l’Opéra
Le Christ de Sancta Susanna - Dans les ateliers de l’Opéra 7 images

Five sculptors worked together to create the imposing eleven-meter-high Christ. The statue is sculpted entirely out of polystyrene and reinforced with resin and fibreglass on the outside for structural solidity.

For the perizoma – Christ’s loincloth – stage designer Sergio Tramonti wanted us to use a simple plastic tarp, like those used to protect floors during renovation work. This material, with its rather sordid and seedy appearance, goes well with the idea of a dilapidated crumbling old cross. It was also necessary for the loincloth to retain some of its transparency to reflect Susanna’s own turmoil.

The Opera often makes use of statues of Christ. Even so, the originality of Mario Martone’s approach lies in the fact that his crucifix is not just merely decorative: He asked us to build it in such a way that at a specific moment in the performance, Susanna could interact with it. What is the nature of that interaction? What does Susanna do with the statue? I’d rather not say too much as I don’t want to undermine the element of surprise…”    

Interviewed by Juliette Puaux

© Brescia e Amisano - Teatro alla Scala

"A sobriety both revealing and spectacular"

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The Italian press on Cavalleria Rusticana

03 min

"A sobriety both revealing and spectacular"

By Carla Bertin

One of the particularities of the Cavalleria Rusticana / Sancta Susanna programme opening soon at Opera Bastille is that the production of Cavalleria Rusticana in the first half of the programme is a revival: Mario Martone staged it in 2011 for La Scala Milan. At that time the work was coupled with Pagliacci, whereas at the Opéra Bastille, it will be followed by Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna. A number of critics praised the finesse and virtuosity of the Italian director’s production.

Press Revue

“ We were expecting Mario Martone to have remained in the 19th century atmosphere that infused his film Noi credevamo. We were delighted by his decision to transpose the action of both operas to the end of the 20th century […]. The ensemble scenes are dazzlingly natural, in both the summer festivities of Pagliacci […] and the Easter celebrations in “Cavalleria”. In the latter, […] Martone places the chorus on an empty stage, some facing the audience, others facing away from it and shrouded in darkness. They are listening to a sermon, which has been perfectly reconstituted, and seem to be both part of the production and something external to it, sitting on their chairs in the church. Martone is well served by Pasquale Mari’s marvellous lighting design.”

Michelangelo Zurletti, La Repubblica, 20th January 2011

“Mario Martone’s production, created in 2011, shows a sobriety both revealing and spectacular […]. The rift between ritual and individual drama, so well represented on the stage, is reflected in the orchestra.”

Angelo Folletto, La Repubblica, 19th January 2014 

“The director, Mario Martone, usually expresses himself from behind the camera or in writing. Recently he has taken part in a number of operatic productions […] Martone has chosen to differentiate the two works [Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci], by giving us a minimalist reading of “Cavalleria” stripped of all its usual flowery rusticity. He has given the characters, freshly emerged from Verga’s play, the masks of a “human tragedy” both passionate and universal.

Daniela Zacconi, Il Corriere della Sera, 11th January 2011

Cavalleria Rusticana has been conceived as a choreography: on stage, movements and stage props are as rare as they are significant, necessary and essential. Spaces are created solely by light: amongst the other highly inspired ideas, we should mention the assimilation of the house and the church into a single location, the constant presence of the chorus on stage and its position either facing the audience or with its back to it, signifying inclusion or exclusion, tolerance or condemnation of the heroine.”

Fabio Vittorini, Il Manifesto 20th June 2015

“The intention of Martone is clear: to reduce as much as possible – almost to eradicate – the distance that separates the audience from the stage and to create a continuum between the artists and the spectators, between the action represented and the emotion experienced. The Neapolitan director aims to affirm that what we see on stage is real life and he explores this axiom through his highly individual vision of these two major works of musical verismo. Martone installs, elongates and stretches the stage, extending it right into the stalls to achieve his objective. […] His “Cavalleria” is characterised by an almost sacred stillness. Here, all is static, governed by a densely significant and perfect geometry.”

Andrea Dellabianca, gbopera.it, 1st February 2011

En Quête sur Sancta Susanna

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En Quête #01

En Quête sur Sancta Susanna

By David Christoffel

Du 28 novembre au 23 décembre Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna est à l’affiche de l’Opéra Bastille. Poète et créateur radiophonique, David Christoffel est parti enquêter sur les traces de Sancta Susanna avec Clémentine, figure contemporaine de Susanna, et Marianne Massin, professeur d'esthétique et philosophie de l'art à l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, auteure de Figures du ravissement (Grasset, 2001) et qui a dirigé deux recueils collectifs aux éditions Ambronay Transe, Ravissement, Extase (2012) et Célébrer/ profaner. Dynamiques de l’écoute et de la création musicale (2016).    

© Elena Bauer / OnP

Mario Martone surprises the Bastille

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Insights into Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna

05 min

Mario Martone surprises the Bastille

By Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Thierry Méranger

The director of the film Morto di un matematico napoletano celebrates the unexpected marriage between Sancta Susanna by Hindemith and Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana at the Opera.

Running from the 23rd November to the 23rd of December, this is a combination that will have audiences flocking to the Opéra Bastille. It is indeed a highly unexpected operatic diptych that the Italian film maker, Mario Martone (Morto di un matematico napoletano, L’odore del sangue, Noi credevamo) has been commissioned to direct. An intriguing head to head. On my left, the archi-well-known Cavalleria rusticana, a one-act opera by Mascagni (1890) which takes place on Easter Sunday in a Sicilian village, with its Intermezzo so beloved of admirers of the theme music to Raging Bull and the epilogue of Godfather III. On my right, a vigorous challenger who, at the last minute, has replaced the usual Pagliacci by Leoncavallo: Sancta Susanna, Paul Hindemith’s lightning short – only 25 minutes long - expressionist opera, an object of such scandal in its day (created in 1922 it portrayed a naked nun kissing the body of Christ on the cross), that initially performances were banned… during Holy Week. The privilege of witnessing rehearsals of this production, in particular a run-through of Sancta Susanna, proved to be an amazing experience. Far from merely filling up a gap in the programme, the “sparring partner” seems to be of one body with the verismo star and illuminates it with its own provocative radicality. Under Martone’s guidance, each opera seems to have taken a step towards the other. An austere Cavelleria, a card this director, no stranger to the operatic stage, has played before at La Scala Milan in 2011: local colour and folklore fade from the mind of the spectator and give way to an altar that the libretto merely alludes to. Susanna, on the other hand, leaves its usual habitat, the church, in order to emphasise the contrast between sacred and erotic passion and to generate multiple spaces. The convent cell, a niche that explodes into a 13th century polyptich, is a marvellous bit of stage scenery, ultimately revealing, at a subterranean level, the phantasmagorical dimension of Hindemith’s opera, in the image of a ghostly nun condemned to be buried alive on account of her carnal desire for Christ crucified. The strength of the production, over and above the pictorial references, lies as much in its theatrical genes as in its cinematic heritage: the fragmentation of the performing space providing an exact parallel with split screen technique as used by Fleischer in The Boston Strangler in 1968.

En répétition
En répétition © Elena Bauer / OnP
       The direction of the gaze of spectators and singers alike, is the main pitch of Martone’s production in which the links woven simultaneously between one space and another are regulated with a pitilessly ingenuous meticulousness. Consequently, the disruption of proportion in Sancta Susanna comes as a surprise: spiders and the body of Christ, all unnaturally large, appear suddenly from the wings or the fly loft… The director gives the following explanation: “The sense of proportion for the mystic act of retreat, like that studied by painters such as Giotto and Fra Angelico, is very contained at first, severe and compact. Then with the explosion of the wall, which opens on every side, it loses its sense of scale: everything becomes completely disproportionate: the figure of Christ is gigantic, a spider spins its way down…” It is scarcely difficult to understand that these changes of scale, which reflect Susanna’s vision, are so many close-ups giving substance to her fantasies. The proliferation of viewpoints associated with the fragmentation of the set provides each spectator with a uniquely individual experience. To quote Martone himself, the production was conceived so that “no two people will see the same thing, depending on where they are sitting. With this compartmentalised set, nobody sees everything. There will always be something hidden from view, even when the set explodes.” Does this question of the position of the spectator constitute a major difference between theatre and cinema direction? The maestro denies any such differentiation. “It’s the same thing in the cinema: what you don’t see is just as important as what you do. My films also often operate by omission, including the narrative. In my first film, Morto di un matematico Napolitano, I chose to recount only the last week in the life of my protagonist, as if everything from before were hidden from view. It’s a way of maintaining the viewer's tension”. And he concludes with advice which, in all logic, should gratify, in a single dictum, director, spectator and protagonist alike: “It is better to wonder why rather than be satisfied with everything.”

Thierry Méranger is a journalist and has been a member of the editorial committee of the Cahiers du Cinéma since 2004.

  • Les Cahiers du Cinéma, partenaire de l'Opéra national de Paris

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  • Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna - Trailer
  • Lumiere sur : Les décors et costumes Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna
  • Lumière sur : Les répétitions de Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna
  • Cavalleria rusticana / Sancta Susanna - Pietro Mascagni / Paul Hindemith

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Opéra Bastille
  • Open 1h before performances and until performances end
  • Get in from within the theatre’s public areas
  • For more information: +33 1 40 01 17 82

Opéra Bastille

Place de la Bastille

75012 Paris

Public transport

Underground Bastille (lignes 1, 5 et 8), Gare de Lyon (RER)

Bus 29, 69, 76, 86, 87, 91, N01, N02, N11, N16

Calculate my route
Car park

Q-Park Opéra Bastille 34, rue de Lyon 75012 Paris

Book your parking spot

In both our venues, discounted tickets are sold at the box offices from 30 minutes before the show:

  • €35 tickets for under-28s, unemployed people (with documentary proof less than 3 months old) and senior citizens over 65 with non-taxable income (proof of tax exemption for the current year required)
  • €70 tickets for senior citizens over 65

Get samples of the operas and ballets at the Paris Opera gift shops: programmes, books, recordings, and also stationery, jewellery, shirts, homeware and honey from Paris Opera.

Opéra Bastille
  • Open 1h before performances and until performances end
  • Get in from within the theatre’s public areas
  • For more information: +33 1 40 01 17 82

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