ALDA MERINI - Kulturimport aus Italien

Cult import from Italy
A radio play about the legendary Italian poet Alda Merini

with Ruth Geiersberger and the Mesconia Quintet

Music by Nino Rota, her contemporary and Oscar winner for film music

Alda Merini (1931-2009) is famous both for her poetic expressiveness and for her extraordinary life. Her work is characterized by sensibility, pain and irony, dislocation, mystical thinking and a clear mind. In her inimitable way, she describes life like a wound, but also like a miracle.

She published her first poems in the early 1950s and was celebrated (by Pasolini, among others) as a new, visionary voice, full of grace and wildness. After a long period as a patient at the Paolo Pini psychiatric clinic, she wrote "The Other Truth" in 1986, the "Diary of a "Different" Woman". This was followed by numerous publications with major publishers such as Einaudi and Mondadori. In 2006, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the last phase of her life, her apartment in Milan's Navigli district became a central location for the artistic scene.

After her death on November 1, 2009, she was given a state funeral in Milan Cathedral and was buried in the "Cimitero Monumentale" cemetery alongside literary greats such as Alessandro Manzoni and Salvatore Quasimodo.

Merini has cult status in Italy today, especially among a young reading public. Her likeness can be seen as graffiti in many Italian cities, accompanied by a few lines of poetry, and she is a posthumous TikTok and Insta star. Her message is understood as a song of freedom and a protest against all forms of exclusion.

Nino Rota (1911-1979) is best known for his film music, including for Fellini and Coppola. In 1975, he won an Oscar for "The Godfather". He saw himself as a classical composer, but was also an exceptionally imaginative improviser. The deep emotional and melodic qualities from his film music can also be found in classical compositions such as the "Concerto per archi" from 1965.

Ruth Geiersberger, winner of the prestigious Theater Prize of the City of Munich (2023), is an outstanding performer, actress, speaker and observer. She will cast her gaze on the small and big things in Alda Merini's life and bring her extraordinary life and poetic genius to the audience in original texts (for the first time in German).

In a sound and word performance, the words of Alda Merini are sometimes heard barefoot, sometimes screaming, and the bittersweet music of Nino Rota, who, like her, dances with silence. The "concerto per archi" was composed in 1965, the year Merini was admitted to the Paolo Pini psychiatric clinic.

Thursday, February 12 and Friday, February 13
8 pm

Voice, performance, direction: Ruth Geiersberger
Idea: Katja Duffek
Music: Mesconia Quintett. Katja Duffek, Corinna Schröder (Vl), Anja Hepp-Dierig (Va), Julia Herrscher (Vc), Susanne Goderbauer (Kb)