ADONIA
Over the centuries, as the Adonis myth has been altered by evolving worldviews, the memory of the ritual Adonia festival held in ancient Athens has remained a part of history. It fascinated not only ancient philosophers such as Plato and Theocritus, but also a number of writers of the Italian Renaissance. The Adonia festival was most likely celebrated in midsummer, towards the end of July. It was a mournful, yet ecstatic occasion for women to mourn the tragically slain Adonis and celebrate his beloved Aphrodite. During the ritual, women made shallow gardens in broken clay pots with fast-growing seeds. Then they climbed ladders to place the vessels on the roofs of their houses next to statues of the deceased Adonis. The sunlit wheat and barley seeds, lettuce and fennel seeds, placed so that they were always exposed to the light of the late July sun, burst their sheaths and awoke to a brief but vibrant green before wilting again after a few days in the blazing July heat. At that moment, the Adonia festival reached its dizzying climax. During the night, the desperate cries of women could be heard emanating from the clouds of perfume and smoke that slowly and heavily wafted through the air: "Woe, woe, Adonis!" The ritual was both a lament for a love cruelly stolen by fate, and a feverish "last dance" with all the fleeting pleasures and desires of life. These seductive little "gardens of Adonis," symbolically telling by their hasty appearance in the world of the living and their end in withering, convey a timeless parable that highlights the dichotomy between duty and pleasure that has so often had a fatal effect throughout history. For many philosophers, this uninhibited yet ritualistic mourning for Adonis is related to the rejection of free culture and progress often found in conservative or authoritarian societies. Our present time unfortunately provides us with current examples of this.
The manuscript mainly used for the presentation of the Adonis story in this concert, MS Modena, Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, α.F.9.9 (ModE), is one of the largest extant collections of strambotto music (the strambotto is a strophic form of 8 or 10 eleven-syllables usually set to music). ModE is also the earliest source of frottole (a collective term for different vertone forms of poetry, where the music follows very closely the prosody of the text) and was probably transcribed around the year 1496. It originated in Padua and was owned by the ruling family of Ferrara, the d'Este, in the 16th century.
To tell the story of Adonis, we used rhetorical devices from Marino's L'Adone of 1623 and Girolamo Parabosco's La favola d'Adone of 1545. Assuming that the strambotti from ModE and some early frottole served as basic material for the interpretation of improvised texts, we selected pieces from ModE as well as two compositions from Petrucci's early prints with frottole, to which we added new texts in ottava rima. The interplay of all these elements allowed us to create an experimental musical representation of the myth of Venus and Adonis as it was handed down in the Renaissance.
With the present concert program, we want to give the listeners a refined gift that corresponds to our idea of how the Adonis story may have been heard many centuries ago. However, our interpretation does not aim to reproduce an exact historical event. Rather, we have chosen to give our own sensory impression of the Adonis myth, from its mysterious beginnings to its furious end. With Adonia, we aim to find commonalities between the historical aesthetics addressed and explored in the concert and our contemporary experiences of love, amorality, and ecstatic grief.
