Arvo Pärt and Robert Wilson first met under the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, an artistic partnership that soon grew under a spiritual influence and led the two artists to the creation of an opera in which music, lights and forms could merge in the exploration of a biblical journey. Adam's Passion was first staged in 2015 at the Noblessner Foundry in Tallinn, Estonia. On Friday, the opera was performed for the first time in Italy, by the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma’s orchestra, chorus and ballet school.
The location was exceptionally moved from the opera house to the Centro Congressi La Nuvola, according to the need to create a narrow stage divided by a walkway that advances towards the audience. Indeed, since the core of the work is the suffering of the first man cast out from Paradise, this particular set represented the Cross of Adam. In Pärt’s music, Adamo’s pain conceals “the search for light” and this is what Wilson tries to depict. The result was incredibly natural: it almost seemed as if Adam's Passion was born with this music, and not through the assemblage – coherent in its non-narrative style – of four musical works by the Estonian composer.
In the first part of the work, Pärt's Adam's Lament (2009) accompanies the condition of human solitude (Adam is “the Man”) after the fall from the Garden of Eden: thus Adam (Michalis Theophanous) walks completely naked, slowly – the movement is imperceptible – with only a stone in his hand. Time is distorted, eternal: the interiority of man (Adam and us, the listeners) is stressed. The torment of the error committed also accompanies Adam under the notes of Sequentia (2014), the only piece composed specifically for this production and dedicated by Pärt to the director.
The orchestra, amplified and placed behind the audience, was conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste and, apart from a few blemishes (also due to the management of a space unsuitable for a traditional resonance), held its own in the difficult test. Particularly outstanding Tabula Rasa (1977) were the two lead violins, Vincenzo Bolognese and Francesco Malatesta, who gave an intense interpretation of its complex canon and variations, accompanying the other figures who vanish on the stage, all nameless: a woman (impeccable Luchinda Childs), a boy, a girl and two heavy men (Endro Roosimae, Erki Laur).
Wilson's visual writing, made up of few gestures and elements, was perfectly integrated into the symbolic, evocative value of Pärt's music. With no intention of illustrating the music or vice versa, the emotional and subjective construction of the work took place in an eternal structure made up of individual events such as small movements and changes of light and colour. So on the one hand we had the spiritual harmonies of the musician propagated in a silent scene, and on the other the sin and precariousness of human life suggested by the instability of the objects that Adam carries balanced on their heads.
Miserere (1989) is at the same time the arrival and the beginning of Adam’s tragic introspection. The vocal patterns designed by Pärt outline the first man’s drama in search of a new love and a new stability. While a little more precision would have helped the chorus, directed by Ciro Visco, the great steadiness of the dancers, who gradually crowded the stage, deserves praise, even the youngest students of the company's ballet school (Ernesto Ruggiero, Virginia Torta, Oliver Reimann and Giulia Balzaretti).
In the end, Adam is no longer a lonely Man, but whether and how God will still love him is an enigma that Pärt's music still leaves open to the ears of the audience.
