About the work
Opera in a prologue and two acts by Luigi Dallapiccola to his own libretto, drawing on Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Divine Comedy – his last and largest work, on which he worked for eight years. The German-language premiere, given under the title 'Odysseus' in a translation by Karl-Heinrich Kreith, took place on 29 September 1968 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin as part of the Berliner Festwochen, conducted by Lorin Maazel.
Plot
The opera follows Odysseus's wanderings in thirteen loosely connected scenes, from his encounter with Calypso and his descent into the underworld through Circe and the Sirens to his homecoming in Ithaca, with the darkly scored Hades scene forming the centre of the symmetrically arranged work.
Cultural significance
Dallapiccola built the entire work from a single network of twelve-tone rows derived from a base series called 'Mare I', condensing his compositional outlook into a summation of his life's work. As his last completed stage work, Ulisse stands as the testament of a composer who spent his career exploring the tension between human freedom and subjection.