We interview Gianni Di Capua, author and director of the documentary “Richard Wagner. Venetian diary of the rediscovered Symphony” which will be previewed on Monday 15 April in Venice.
The episode at the center of the film retraces the staging and performance of the Symphony in C, an early work by Wagner considered lost that the German composer conducted in the privacy of his family, on Christmas evening 1882, placing himself at the head of a very special orchestra, formed by the teachers and students of the Benedetto Marcello Music High School, gathered in the largest of the Apollinee halls at the time the seat of the Venetian musical institution.
In the documentary, the reconstruction of the story is articulated on the basis of textual references extracted from the Bericht über die Wiederaufführung eines Jugendwerkes (Report of a youthful symphony rediscovered) written by Wagner in the aftermath of the historic execution and come on Diaries, the Diaries of Cosima, to which Mario Zucca and Marina Thovez give voice and face and onto which the testimony of Giuseppe Norlenghi's time is grafted, taken from his Wagner in Venice interpreted here by Vasco Mirandola.
While Igor Cognolato, one of the most sensitive interpreters of the romantic repertoire, performs and illustrates some pieces of the symphony on the piano, revealing how much the youthful work, with an exquisitely Beethovenian character, still has characteristics traceable in the work of maturity.
FIRST Art – How the documentary he titled was born: Richard Wagner. Venetian diary of the rediscovered Symphony??
Di Capua – The documentary is drawn from the materials I gathered while writing the screenplay for a feature film finished last year. More precisely, the screenplay was inspired by the incipit of “Verdi. Romanzo dell'Opera” by Franz Werfel published in 1924, in which the Austrian writer resumes the performance of the symphony in C in the Apollinee halls, imagining the incognito presence of Giuseppe Verdi who arrived in Venice in an attempt to study the work of the German composer , finally deciding on a questionable and improbable meeting with the rival that will never happen both in the novel and in reality. Therefore, starting from the historical data of the performance of Wagner's early work, I proceeded by reconstructing the staging by crossing different sources, grafting fictional protagonists who, together with those who really existed, act in musical Venice at the end of the nineteenth century, against the background of the between the two apparently opposing poetics of Verdi and Wagner, evidently distant from each other from a musical point of view, but with undeniable points of relationship that open up to the understanding of fascinating constitutive paths of European culture and identity. Writing a screenplay on this theme was an extraordinary, enriching journey from which I in fact extrapolated the episode of the symphony staging, eliminating all the elements of fiction, bringing out what was the last concert conducted by Wagner.
FIRST Art – This is the last concert conducted by Wagner because he will die a few weeks later, in Cà Vendramin, right?
From Capua – Wagner died in Cà Vendramin on 13 February 1883, a few weeks after the execution. The tragic datum offers a somewhat dramatic reading of the execution, loading it with those signs which in the light of the death are significant for an interpretation of the facts, for the understanding, indeed, for the intuition, of one of the most fascinating and complex of the nineteenth century and beyond. But to return to your question, of how this documentary was born, what inspired it, here, I would add, is the desire, an impulse to share a narrative, that is, to participate in it, to reflect, question, finally involving those who listen to us.
FIRST Art – Of the Venice of the late nineteenth century you mentioned, how do you tell a Venice asleep in its own romantic myth and at the same time intellectually lively with musical culture, as it appears from your research?
Di Capua – the environment of the period, I am referring to the almost unknown characters of our story, is told filtered through their actions. Stories that reserve unexpected surprises. You see, the musical civilization of the late nineteenth century, but also of any era, investigated through singular stories, helps to bring music back from a historicist dimension, that is, related to a precise historical context, to its everyday life. In the episode at the center of our documentary, everyday life is represented by the activity of a high school of music, its teachers, its president and founder Giuseppe Contin who one day in December goes to visit Richard Wagner accompanied by one of his more capable and brilliant professors, Raffaele Frontali. The latter had met the German composer the previous evening at Princess Harzfeld's house, on the occasion of a party given in honor of the aristocratic mother of Marie Von Schleinizt, friend and confidante of Cosima Wagner, financier of the Festspielhause of Bayreuth. The meeting between Frontali and Wagner, using a term proper to the screenwriter is inciting incident that is, the conflict from which the action of the story starts and causes the protagonist, or protagonists, to take initiatives, to act. In short, without this event, there would not have been our story but in the state in which our protagonists were, Wagner with the strong desire to listen to the symphony again and at the same time pay homage to his wife on her birthday, we could best described as a state of imperfection made explicit.
FIRST Art – Combining the concept of decadence of that period with something modern seems to be a contradiction for Venice…
Di Capua – It is one of the less evident aspects of the documentary which nevertheless must be understood in one of its narrative registers. I believe that the idea of decadence is inherent in the city itself, if we turn to its urban planning anomaly, to the apparent immutability that determines its mythological or, as I said before, romantic scope, as not only Wagner, but a plethora of European aristocrats had cultured by settling there for shorter periods, including Princess Hatzfeld. Undermining this romantic vision means depriving Venice of the evidence of one of its own asset dominants which in its worst aspect - and also the most evident - is identified in the irreversible process of decadence triggered by the fall of the Serenissima in 1797, in its pop version, its "Disneyisation" which often overwhelms what instead attempts are made to oppose it to balance the game. Culture and "decadence" are the reverse of the same coin. It is necessary to establish what the city, but also the country's government, decides to invest in. Here we go again. In this, the intuition of the Biennale, but it is not the only one, probably plays the most important role. In Venice, as in the rest of the country, I have the impression that there is a chronic difficulty in creating a system of shared projects, which somehow recalls the dynamics of Goldon's "campiello": an incessant game of events in a closed universe which seems to find its unity and interest only in the threat of the intrusion of extraneous elements. Where the stranger is represented by one's neighbor.
FIRST Art – From the point of view of the image, how did you go about telling a story recovered in the present? ?
Di Capua – One of the problems that most afflicts a director in telling a story from the past is the context – put it on stage – with which he goes to recover it in dialogue with the present. It is certainly the most complex aspect, but also the most fascinating because it determines the value of the visual narration; in our documentary we have avoided any intrusion of fictional elements which were easy to adopt in the genre docudrama, which I personally prefer less, choosing an option, so to speak, "creative" of a decidedly opposite sign, in the case of this documentary, i.e. the constant unveiling of the cinematographic machine in favor of the musical text.
FIRTS Art – We can say that it is a musical text entrusted essentially to the piano…
From Capua – the performance of the score of the Symphony in C is interpreted and illustrated on the piano by Igor Cognolato, one of the most appreciated Italian interpreters of romantic music of the last generations, Cognolato undertakes the transcription for piano by Davide Coppola, revised on the basis of the manuscript autograph kept at the Library of Congress in Washington. This is the transcription for piano - the first movement missing - signed by Wagner found by a Munich antiquarian in the collection of the music historian and musicologist Karl Friedrich Wietzmann. The manuscript was later acquired by the philanthropist Gertrude Clarke Whittall, who at the beginning of the last century included it in her library donated to the Library of Congress, Music Division of Washington.
FIRST Art – While the staging of the symphony is made present through the textual evocation taken from the Diaries of Cosima Wagner and from the testimony of Giuseppe Norlenghi according to a staging that one would not expect to see: a recording studio…
Di Capua – In the first draft of the script for the documentary, we had thought of rearranging the performance of the symphony performed by the students of the Benedetto Marcello conservatory in the Apollinee halls of the Teatro la Fenice, thus reconstructing that event in an ideal contiguity between the past and the present. This was not possible and highlights the contradiction between what was possible in the XNUMXth century, for example, and which for a number of reasons seems impossible today. And technology has nothing to do with it. Then we chose a different and for us more convincing narrative solution which identified excellent interpreters in the voices and faces of Vasco Mirandola, Marina Thovez and Mario Zucca and we wanted to reveal them always in line with the intention of revealing the structure of the staging highlighting the objectivity of the text. But let me add something about the musical text on the score.
FIRST Art - Please…
From Capua – Anton Seidl, at the time of the discovery of some parts of the symphony inside a trunk found in an attic in Dresden in 1877, had been commissioned by Wagner to recompose it. Seidl was the only one to whom Wagner allowed to lay hands on his own compositions, which says a lot about the consideration Wagner nourished for the pupil, among other things, in vain exhorted to join him in Venice, to take over the direction of the orchestra of the musical high school. Several years after the master's death, Saidl, who moved to the United States - where he would become the director of the New York Philharmonic - declared to a journalist who asked him about the youthful symphony: «Just as one takes off his hat in front of the house where Wagner was born , as a sign of respect for the place where his genius was born, the musicians of the future will do the same when they have in their hands - fascinated and surprised - this symphony, the cornerstone of that structure which has its keystone in the Tristan , in the Götterdämmerung and in Parsifal». After listening to the symphony found on December 24, her birthday, Cosima noted in her diary "this man (Wagner) did not know the feeling of fear", a judgment that Nietzsche declined in the "ruthless will and self-discipline which lasted for lifetime". And it is thus that the approach of death coincides with a sort of rediscovered youth, which preserves and conceals within itself, as I said, some prodromes of maturity that we identify here in the analysis of the symphony first in depth and then illustrated effectively by Igor Cognolato who in this work of ours, he combines and expresses a perspicacious analysis of the musical text with musical sensitivity.
FIRST Art – To the musical art the documentary presents a precious selection of photographic art of the time, at least that's how it seems…
Di Capua – In fact, the visual system reflects and restores Richard Wagner's gaze on 800th century Venice through rare photographs from important photographic archives including the Vanzella-Treviso Collection, the precious glass negatives exposed to the lens for the first time of a camera from the Naya-Böhm Archive and finally the images from the IRE's “Fondo Tomaso Filippi” including a very rare image of the Sale Apollinee of the Teatro La Fenice as it appeared to the composer's eyes.
FIRST Art – in conclusion, what can a viewer expect by seeing the documentary?
From Capua – You see, our documentary is far from being a hagiography of the German composer, much less an attempt to resolve the complexity of his musical thought, but a, as I said, "creative" way of demonstrating the "truth". I mean that the telling of a story, any story, is the living proof of an idea, that is, the conversion of an idea into action. In short, with the event structure of our story, punctuated by the Venetian Diary of Cosima Wagner - here is the reason for the title - we have tried to communicate an idea without resorting to the need to explain it. A founding principle of fictional cinema that perhaps we wanted to exercise speciously in the documentary genre.
Richard Wagner. Venetian diary of the rediscovered Symphony" is a transmedia project declined in an app-documentary and will inspire a theater piece. The application, available today for Android and, from April for iPhone and iPad also in English in a free version, offers various navigation methods including unpublished image galleries and a map of Venice which displays the points of interest present in the narration with the possibility of elaborating itineraries on the traces of the walks made by Richard Wagner.
The documentary was produced by Kublai Film of Venice in association with Tunastudio, created with the support of the Veneto Region - Regional Film Fund - and is sponsored by the Municipality of Venice, is realized with the collaboration of the Richard Wagner Association of Venice, the "Benedetto Marcello" Conservatory of Music, Fest-Fenice Theater Services, Civic Museums Foundation of Venice.
