The composer Luigi Dallapiccola was born in 1904 in Istria. During World War I, he was interned in Graz along with his family and later went on to study piano in Florence and establish the twelve-tone technique of the Second Viennese School in Italy. Between 1938 and 1941, under the impact of Mussolini’s tyranny, he composed his three Songs from Captivity. Based on a prayer from Stefan Zweig’s Maria Stuart, an excerpt from The Consola­tion of Philosophy by Boethius and the psalm In Te Domine Speravi by Girolamo Savonarola, Dallapiccola created an atonal cry against fascism that transcends time.
In a collaboration with the vocal ensemble Cantando Admont, the ten musicians of PHACE and five actors, the Croatian choreographer Matija Ferlin and the dramaturge and writer Goran Ferčec present a stage production of the three songs as three scenic images. And, just as they did in 2021 with Sad Sam Matthäus, they are adopting and adapting a first-person autofiction approach to the plot and the narrative. An evening dedicated to the human need for freedom.