About the work
Il teorema di Pasolini is a music-theatre work by the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli (b. 1953), who also wrote the libretto — freely based on the 1968 film and novel "Teorema" by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The premiere, a commission by the Deutsche Oper Berlin, took place on 9 June 2023 in Italian; the production was directed by the collective Dead Centre. Battistelli had first turned to the material in 1992 at the suggestion of Hans Werner Henze.
Plot
At the centre is an haute-bourgeois Italian industrialist family held together only by conventions. The appearance of a mysterious stranger is enough: his erotic magnetism seduces every member in turn — father, mother, son, daughter and the housemaid Emilia — and leads each to their "true destiny". After his disappearance the rigid system falls apart: some succumb to unbridled sexuality, madness or suicide, others give away their possessions. Through this one family the work diagnoses the collapse of bourgeois society.
Cultural significance
With Il teorema di Pasolini, one of his roughly twenty music-theatre works, the grand seigneur of contemporary Italian music achieved a widely noted success. The premiere was part of the events marking Pasolini's centenary and translated his radical, still unsettling critique of society into a subtle, tautly dramatic new score.