Dafne

The tragic outcome of Apollo’s mad infatuation with the nymph Daphne is the subject of the famous Dafne libretto by the German baroque poet Martin Opitz, written in 1627. The text can be interpreted in several ways. We have a text from an era during which music theatre originated, and was therefore rather more experimental than in the following centuries. Then there is the language, which requires a historical dictionary to be understood, but whose power, opulence and originality is immediately fascinating: double meanings that loom beneath a superficially frugal story and its characters. A constant veering between comedic elements and the sense of imminent tragedy; a choir that adds clumsy comments to the events, pointing out their deeper meaning. And if we think about the historical circumstances – the situation in Germany during the fi rst decade of the Thirty Years’ War – we cannot avoid the dark side of this strange play of gods and shepherds, written to entertain a feudal wedding party: the pervading sense of foreboding points simultaneously at Dafne’s fate and at the tragedy of war.
This new version embraces the ironical treatment of the comical keynote of the dialogues and the eruption of terror: the tempestuous love for Dafne that captures Apollo, driving him crazy and killing Dafne in the end, and the ominous ‘wild beast’, that Opitz uses metaphorically for the war that lurks everywhere. The dramatic structure follows this idea of doubling: the whole story is in effect told twice, once close to the original libretto and in a tone that suggests that all this could as well be just play-acting; but then – with Dafne’s death – an instrumental interlude entitled ‘Verwandlungsmusik’ (Transformation music), ushers in the second part which, though based on the same storyline, is anything but comedy. The pivotal scene is the core dialogue between Dafne and Apollo that appears almost identically in both parts – once accompanied with strings, then arranged for winds, in which only subtle differences in the vocal and instrumental parts mark the border between ‘acted’ and ‘real’. (based on Benjamin Schweitzer’s programme notes)