The Nutcracker in Rome
The beautiful Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera (http://www.operaroma.it/stagione/stagione_2011_2012/balletti) will present from the 20th to the 30th of December, one of the greatest Christmas classics; the Nutcracker ballet by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), without which it is almost impossible to imagine the festivities that celebrate the Winter Solstice in West, something like without the traditional lights that for a few weeks miraculously transform the look of the cities, or the magical gifts and good wishes that citizens exchanged all over the world.

On the stage of the famous Roman theater, place of the emotional time lived a few months ago during the performance of Nabucco de Verdi, held to commemorate the one hundred fifty years of the Italian unification, when the famous orchestra director Riccardo Muti, broke a habit rooted in him and went to ask the public to join the chorus of the song Va pensiero after making a parallel between their situation, which in times of the romantic composer de Verdi used as an allegory of the situation of the oppressed people of Italy, and the transalpine country’s culture under Berlusconi’s government in these words: “I have lived my life traveling extensively throughout the world over 60 years, and as Italian I feel ashamed of what is happening in my country. So he accepted the request to make Va Pensiero again. This is not only for the patriotic joy I feel, but because tonight, when I directed the choir singing ‘Oh, my beautiful and lost country’ I thought that If it continues like that, if we do not help the culture, our country will be truly ‘beautiful and lost’, -on the same stage, we said, is displayed, as in so many countries for more than a century during the last days of this beautiful and disturbing story of broken toys, robots, objects that in parallel worlds come to life and always happy haunting and fascinating of E.T.A Hoffmann immortalized by an envelope whose hypnotic music is delicate and abysmally introduces viewers to the latest galleries leaving blood, aided by a dreamy choreography non-easily forgotten, suspended in a somnambulistic state open, as befits the days that advertise and serve threshold to the birth of the Sun and the New Year, to the astonishment, the exceptional, the mystery and magic, which corresponds to a state of grace.
Uncertainty about the consistency of the territory that supposedly separates the waking and sleeping spaces, woven here with movements, words and images as a happy musical blanket of change that has the power of imagination through the conventional perception of things to access the true life, the one that poets and the Gnostics speak about, is characteristic of all truly spiritual sense or even if you feel in communion with others, religious.
Maybe that’s why this strange and overpowering Christmas story, with all its exoticism resources, typical of late nineteenth century, continues to affect us so deeply and intimately. Rent apartments in Rome for the celebrations of the solstice, do not miss it.
Translated by: Hans
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Translated by: aleixgwilliam

















