Librettist: Paulo Tunhas
Date: 2006
Language: English
Duration: 32 minutes
Small-scale
Soprano
Tenor
Baritone
The work explores the tumultuous contours of a love triangle, centred on the characters Vera, Dave and Chuck. Instead of a linear narrative, the story is fragmented and reinterpreted through three artistic mediums.
The first part, the video (composition by Iris ter Schiphorst), functions as a dreamlike or hallucinatory sequence. It can be understood as the dream or nightmare of a character who relives, in a distorted and abstract way, a profound experience of change and displacement. The visual elements established here will only be fully understood in retrospect.
The second part, dance, with a musical section by Frédèric Durieux is described by the director as a “fantasy”. Through the movement of three dancers, the emotional conflicts and dynamics of the love triangle are translated into choreography, exploring jealousy and desire in a more physical and symbolic way than narrative.
The last part, the opera by the hand of António Pinho Vargas, Paulo Tunhas’s text is delivered to the voices of three singers (soprano, tenor and baritone). It is in this section that the emotional drama reaches its climax, with the declaration of feelings and the direct confrontation between love, hatred and jealousy, closing the cycle of this “little madness” of spring.¹
Fl | Ob | Cl (Bcl) | Bsn | Tpt | Hn | Tbn | 2 Perc | Pf | Hp | Vln | Vla | Vc | Cb
The work is distinguished by its collaborative and multidisciplinary structure, bringing together three composers – Frédèric Durieux (dance), António Pinho Vargas (opera) and Iris ter Schiphorst (video) – based on an original libretto by the Porto-based poet and philosopher Paulo Tunhas.
Under the stage direction, set design and choreography of Giuseppe Frigeni, the story of a love triangle is deconstructed and retold through three sequential mediums: first video, then dance, and finally opera. Frigeni transformed the Sala Suggia into a bucolic landscape with three stage levels, artificial grass and natural oak trees, creating an “open space” that dialogues with the room’s large window. The director describes the narrative as a “polyhedron”, where the same story is projected through different prisms – like a dream or hallucinatory nightmare in the video, a fantasy in the dance, and a more concrete narrative in the opera, drawing inspiration from the dreamlike universes of David Lynch. The title, taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, reflects this ambiguity between abstraction and comprehension. António Pinho Vargas emphasises that the show begins in an abstract way, “in a departure from the text”, gradually approaching narrative clarity only in the final operatic part, where the feelings of love, hate and jealousy become explicit.¹
Date: 2006
Venue: Casa da Música, Porto
Commission: Casa da Música
Stage Director: Giuseppe Frigeni
Music Director: Franck Ollu
Cast: Eduarda Melo, Matthew Beale, Ivan Ludlow, Teresa da Silva, Daniel Cardoso, Romulus Neagu and Remix Ensemble
1. Natália Faria, «Pequenas loucuras de Primavera na rentrée da Casa da Música», Público, 14 de Setembro de 2006, https://www.publico.pt/2006/09/14/jornal/pequenas-loucuras-de-primavera–na-rentree-da-casa-da-musica-97551
