FULL When Craft Becomes Opera Experimentum Mundi (Giorgio Battistelli) Documentary Italy 2000

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: When Craft Becomes Opera Experimentum Mundi  
• Composer: Battistelli Giorgio   
• Libretto: Giorgio Battistelli  
• Venue & Opera Company: Italy  
• Recorded: 2000
• Type: Other
• Singers:
• Conductor:   
• Orchestra:
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: die film gmbH  
• Date Published: 2000  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
• Subtitles: yessubs, ensubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  The musical portrait of an artisans’ opera with the citizens of Albano Laziale in Italy and their conductor Giorgio Battistelli. First shown on the occasion of the ceremonial reopening of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

  What connects a shoemaker and a baker, a cooper and a knife grinder with the work of a renowned avant-garde composer? They all come from the small Italian town of Albano Laziale and, from time to time, perform their crafts together on stage. Strictly following the score and conducting of composer Giorgio Battistelli, a wall, a shoe, a barrel, and even delicious tagliatelle are created over the course of the musical “action.” Scissors are sharpened, horseshoes are forged. Breathtaking rhythms, the highest and lowest tones, accompanied by women’s voices recalling ancient times, names, figures, and objects are woven into a dense tapestry of sound — immediate and archaic at once.

  “These magnificent artisans can play asymmetrical rhythms completely naturally, and it was a great stroke of luck for me to meet these wonderful people, who were willing to take part in inventing a sound world that is also a representation of human experience,” says Giorgio Battistelli of the collaborative Opera di musica immaginistica, which, since its premiere in 1981, has now been performed more than 110 times around the world.

  Grace Yoon and Doris Wedemeier, together with cinematographer Heiner Stadler, accompanied the artisans and Battistelli in associative images: their everyday lives, the preparations and rehearsals, and finally a performance in Munich. The result is a poetic camera-music film about the world of artisans, a world that is already close to disappearing.

  “With Experimentum Mundi, I wanted to save a part of this world — not as in a museum, but through a kind of ‘ready-made’ in the manner of Duchamp, by depriving an object of its function and context and placing it in an entirely new one.”

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