La Pellegrina, a Florentine celebration: Dijon Opera
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Mixing for the first time different artistic disciplines, La Pellegrina marks the birth of Opera in the 16th century, long before Monteverdi’s Orfeo.
Total spectacle, encompassing Theatre, Music, Dance and Poetry, was not just a Wagnerian ideal, but also a Florentine reality!
In the spring of 1589, to celebrate the arrival of Christine de Lorraine, who was joining her new husband the Grand‐Duke Ferdinand de Medici, the Tuscan city prepared a thousand splendors. The capstone of the festivities: a performance of La Pellegrina, a comedy by Girolamo Bargagli, for which no fewer than seven different composers wrote the intermediary scenes played between the acts, accompanied by sumptuous decors and mechanical effects.
It is for these interludes that musical history remembers the event, because they are perhaps – 28 years before Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Jacopo Peri’s Euridice – the first attempt at theatrical action sung in music.
In fact, Peri participated in the event, along with the greatest composers of the period. All or nearly all were members of the Camerata Fiorentina, a veritable artistic and humanist think tank of the Renaissance that, since 1573, sought to broaden the principles of recitar cantando (recitation by singing) in order to develop a new relationship between text and music, with the objective of achieving the greatest expression of the emotions: the opera.
Les Traversees Baroques and director Andreas Linos have chosen to help us penetrate to the heart of eight months of preparation for the most ambitious performance of the 16th century.
Between the interludes, in place of the text by Bargagli, a new libretto by Rémi Cassaigne plunges us into the intrigues and internecine struggles, as arise in all intellectual debates, within this boiling Florentine cauldron from which would spring that artistic liberty and freedom of thought that we know today as the Baroque.
Intermedi da La Pellegrina, on music by Antonio Archilei, Giovanno de’Bardi, Giulio Caccini, Emilio de’Cavalieri, Cristofano Malvezzi, Luca Marenzio, Jacopo Peri.
Libretto Rémi Cassaigne
Les Traversees Baroques
Artistic Direction Judith Pacquier
Conductor Etienne Meyer
Staging | Stage Design | Costume Andreas Linos
Staging assistant Nathalie Gendrot
