About this Event
Unanimously regarded as the greatest poem of love of all time, Song of the Songs (also known as the Canticle of Canticles) is among the most recent books of the Old Testament. Its expressive freshness has carried its expressive freshness through the millennia and inspired centuries of musical, figurative, and literary masterpieces, epitomes of human creativity.
This brief work, consisting of only 117 verses, has long intrigued biblical scholars, theologians, and writers. The most widely accepted modern view is the literal one, which, through scenes of sublime poetry and veiled eroticism, portrays the love between Solomon (who, in the literary fiction, is also the poem’s author) and the Shulammite.
Rather than offering a fully developed and coherent plot, the text unfolds as a sequence of scenes centered on that grand and powerful mystery: the love between man and woman. Perhaps this is the key to a work that mentions God only once, yet precisely for that reason reveals His essence more profoundly than many others.
Our event offers a complete reading of the most up-to-date and authoritative translation by the biblist scholar Gianni Barbiero, based on the edition Cantico dei Cantici – ed. Paoline 2004, an essential reference to the text for those who wish to delve into the poem’s most intimate depths. Barbiero’s version restores to the text its original freshness and authenticity of expression, freeing it both from the saccharine churchly varnish of older readings and from the salacious eroticism of certain modern ones.
The scenic conception is curated by Luca Benassi (renowned poet and literary critic), who plays the role of Solomon, while Shulammite is portrayed by Flaminia Cruciani. Another fundamental element of the performance is the rendition by the Schola Romana Ensemble of musical pieces from the Canticum Canticorum by one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: a program the ensemble has presented several times this year in Italy and abroad to mark the composer’s 500th anniversary.
Music and acting form the ideal counterpoint, a distillation of beauty and harmony that seeks to render every nuance of the fresco outlined by the author of the sacred text, punctuated by the “tempo del canto” (Ct 2,12) in the alternating of the seasons, of day and night, of the breaths of the winds, the movement of the stars. Through acting and music, in our performance, the colors, the sound, and the smells of the Middle Eastern setting in which the protagonists move come to life.
Artists:
Flaminia Cruciani
Shulammite
Luca Benassi
Solomon
Alma Ghiani, Alice Serra
Chorus of Shulammite's companions
SCHOLA ROMANA ENSEMBLE
Paola Alonzi
Soprano
Franco Todde
Tenor e Renaissance guitar
Lorenzo Sabene
Renaissance lute
Stefano Sabene
Renaissance traversa-recorder
*** Admission to this event is free and open to the public until capacity is reached. This registration does not guarantee a seat.
We therefore invite you to arrive early.
Once the event has begun, entry will not be permitted.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Chiesa di S. Maria in Cappella, Via Pietro Peretti, 6, Roma, Holy See (Vatican City)
EUR 0.00
