Rufus Wainwright from pop to lyric. “Hadrian” has its strength in the voices

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The long-awaited love duet arrives at the end of the second act, and it is a true duet of yesteryear, with the voices rising to the high notes doubled by the violins. The novelty is that it is about the love between him and him, the emperor Hadrian and his beloved Antinous, united in spite of convention, the threatening growth of homophobic Christianity and a Sibyl who prophesies that Antinous will have to die so that Hadrian can live, as then promptly comes to pass to the dismay of the inconsolable Caesar. But after all, we have all read the Memoirs of Hadrian, even Rufus Wainwright , a singer-songwriter and pop author struck by the path of opera and the need to break the heterosexual monopoly of the love & death binomial in music and, in short, to write a gay Tristan or Pelléas (he is aiming, as you can see, rather high). The result is Hadrian, a “grand opera” in four acts that debuted in 2022 at the Real in Madrid and, in its Italian premiere, on Friday as the inauguration of the Festival dei due mondi in Spoleto . Always for the aforementioned ambitions, an opera: large orchestra, choir, a poster this long and three hours of duration.

Net of the snobbery inherent to the environment for those who do not leave the menagerie of "classical", it must be said that Wainwright handles the tools of the trade very well: he knows how to write for the orchestra and also for the voices, and indeed his vocal writing, a traditional sore point of "contemporary" opera, seems to me to be Hadrian's strongest point. The weak points are a sometimes verbose libretto by Daniel MacIvor and a music that almost never manages to define the dramaturgy, therefore the characters, their relationships, their contrasts, but limits itself to accompanying them as if it were an XXL-sized soundtrack. The problem is not the language, deliberately retro, but its reluctance to become theater, also because it is always emphatic and exclamatory (and a bit repetitive, too). But in this way the excess of effects ruins the effect, and the opera ends up seeming longer than it actually is. There is a bit too much of everything, in short.

The responsibility also lies with the curious show seen at the Menotti theater and designed by Jörn Weisbrodt, the composer's husband. It is more of a concert performance and less of a semi-staged one: they are in civilian clothes, sitting on chairs that are overturned when the person occupying them dies, and they act but always holding the score in their hands. In compensation, on a huge screen the beautiful black and whites of Robert Mapplethorpe run, even quite risqué, for example a long series of close-ups of male bottoms. In the long run, however, they too are repetitive: give and take, even the ass gets tired after a while. Excellent, on the other hand, the performance, conducted by Johannes Debus with a Maltese orchestra, local choir and a company that is functional overall but where, even there, everyone always sings a little too loudly. The exception that confirms the rule, the glorious Sonia Ganassi, present by surprise as the ghost of the deceased empress Plotinia: the best on the field (holy, in her case). Much applause.

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