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By Maria Lombardo
ASIMOV Isaac, Kazan Elia, Lugosi Bela, Strasberg Lee, Valentino
Rodolfo, but also Martino Giovanni, Sani Rosa, Sapegno Felicita...
all the officer at Ellis Island does is call out the names of
these new arrivals from the other side of the Atlantic, verify
their identity and state of health, and make them answer questions.
“Have you ever been in prison?” “Do you intend
to overthrow the U.S. government by force?” “Do
you intend to kill the president?” The odyssey of the
European emigrants now citizens of the United States of America
for generations lives again, in the notes of composer Giovanni
Sollima's opera “Ellis Island,” just opened at Teatro
Massimo di Palermo. The libretto is by Roberto Alajmo, direction
by Marco Baliani, sets by Carlo Cala, costumes by Daniela Cernigliaro,
lights by Bruno Ciulli.
Ellis Island was the “shore of hope,” “the
golden gates” through which over 12 million people would
enter the states in the span between 1892 (the year the receiving
station was opened) and 1954 (when it closed). Their names scrambled
by the police because they don't know the emigrants' native
languages, their state of anticipation, of apprehension, their
identities cancelled by new ones (their surnames were often
changed, as is well known) - the Palermo composer has made all
this into music. Sollima is known to US audiences for his performances
as a musician (they call him “the cello man”) at
Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and also New York's
Knitting Factory and Merkin Concert Hall. He recorded “Aquilarco”
in '98 for Philip Glass's La Point Music. His time in New York
is related to his composition “Hell,” the first
part of a work based on the Divine Comedy.
His opera “Ellis Island,” which has been selling
out these days in Palermo, is based on “speech-music,”
as his work has been before. He searches among fusions of language
and sound for that musicality of the primogenitive word which
is not art but is art.
The set is a large cage where the new arrivals are kept waiting.
The loudspeaker is filling the air with their names. Some of
the emigrants tell their personal stories, privileged witnesses
in an opera that's intended to be, and mostly is, choral.
Elisa, the singer and Italian pop star, a winner at the last
Sanremo Festival, acts the part of an Italian emigrant named
Felicita Sapegno who recounts in the first person her story
of being uprooted from her native land. Recordings of other
female and male voices are superimposed upon and stacked over
hers. Elisa performs in English, but this is her debut in theatre.
The work is part musical, part modern opera, and because of
the static posture of the characters on the set, part oratorio.
The staticness is natural to the opera's ultimate meaning: that
state of suspension which is voyage, passage, anticipation.
The ship and the Ellis Island cage both ride out this drama
of identities suspended toward an uncertain future, upon waves
of hard notes, bitter notes which occasionally yield to Bernsteinian
hints. The second part of the opera tells of the Kurdish, Pakistani,
and Singalese emigrants on “sea wagons” clandestinely
reaching the Sicilian coasts. Emigration is a drama with no
end.
Elisa - who is about to enter the states herself on an international
tour - is truly brilliant at forming her voice to Sollima's
difficult sounds. The research that librettist Roberto Alajmo
and the composer have done is extremely valuable to the show.
Sollima went to the states, found Signora Corinta Nirvana Ciano,
niece of Galeazzo Ciano, and recorded her telling the story
of this embarassing surname that she was forced by necessity
to adopt, one of the curiosities of the show. Ferrucio Barbera,
marketing director at Teatro Massimo di Palermo, did a wonderful
thing. He set up a computer in the foyer with the website -
www.ellisisland.org - so the people in the audience can find
out which person with their last name, on which date, was the
first to disembark and set foot in the United States.
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