Summary
Nedjeljko Fabrio: Orfej's children
»(...) They grew up on the bel canto, which was played while the laundry was arranged and hung on the dryer, while greens from weeds and worms were chopped for Lent dinner or, in the morning, the beard was soaped. For decades, staggiones from Italy visited the city, human lives sprouted, swelled, died out in the deep conviction that in the world, when it comes to musical theater, there is nothing else but the Italian opera buffo with its Don Bartoli and Don Pasquale, sentimental civil semi-serious opera with cavatinas and arios, and great heroic opera. But what they were listening to now confused them, numbed them. Dazed.
They stood on the shore, stepping into the water of an infinitely powerful wide river that, from beat to beat, little by little, revealed itself before them and which hardly rushed anywhere, but on the contrary flowed around, thick, layered, sifting like a motionless sea depth for the pure vertical summer sun, without a single superfluous backwater into which some bouncy phrase or ordinary, human non-seriousness, without a single shift into pretentiousness, without the news of the clique.
What surprised Orestes the most (and what, once upon a time, he tried to explain to Wanda, but without any success because art, and hence the very talk about it, unlike everything else that exists, is an artificially made part of nature that depends on the whim of the one who is willing to create that nature, just as much as on the whim of the one who is willing to receive that nature) it was hidden in the almost physical presence of a certain volitional, mathematically summable or subtractable, elusive texture of sound, which settled in the air and which replaced not only Oreste's previous idea of music as a beautiful song, but also the happenings on the stage. Namely, he caught himself being caught by the music, then how he himself caught the music, which seemed elusive to him, and how, in the end, he no longer cares about whether he understands the "content" that moves the characters and justifies their actions, as for example in the scene on the enchanted lake or in Klingsor's castle, that is, whether he perceives at least a little of the magic of Good Friday. Rather, music imposes its own, inner image on him (...)«
Nedjeljko Fabrio: "Exercising life"
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