The Lady in the Moonlight, Op. 41 (1977)

Description:

The one-act play by Yannis Ritsos, The Moonlight Sonata, was for me both a surprise and a challenge right from the start: a surprise filled with admiration because the poet, with simple means, manages to tell an ordinary “sentimental” story, creating a theatrical genre with uninterrupted flow and—most importantly—expressive extensions that go far beyond both the text and the myth; and a challenge, because the musical phrase from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2 (Moonlight), which Ritsos uses here obviously as a pretext, could in a musical work impart to the expressive extensions of the theatrical text the dimension that the poet, deliberately or not, sought from the beginning.

However, in a musical work of the type I wanted to write, I don’t think the title The Moonlight Sonata was appropriate. Thus, it was transformed into Lady of the Moonlight, while the musical phrase from Beethoven’s sonata (which often alludes to Ritsos’s theatrical work) here becomes a basic musical cell with three different notes (G-sharp, C-sharp, E) that, with necessary shifts, alterations, or variations, are heard throughout the entire work but do not reveal their original source until just before the end.

Lady of the Moonlight was written in 1977, for narrator, mezzo-soprano, viola, clarinet, and guitar, and was first performed in 1978 without stage action, with Katie Kopanitsa and the current performers, conducted by Yiannis Ioannidis. In 1979, it was transcribed for full symphonic orchestra without narrator but with the addition of a silent figure who listens indifferently to the Lady’s heart-wrenching narration from beginning to end, only to burst into loud mocking laughter as they leave.

Today’s performance is the first staged presentation of the work, retaining from the original writing its instrumental ensemble (viola, clarinet, guitar) and the narrator, while from the second version, it includes the silent figure.

(Written for the programme of the concert on 1 May 1991 held at the Lyric Workshop of Open Theatre (Λυρικό Εργαστήρι Ανοιχτού Θεάτρου), with mezzo-soprano Maria Marketou and conductor Nikos Tsouchlos.

-This is a near-verbatim translation of Sicilianos’s Greek text.