by Richard Wagner
told by Mara Cantoni
illustrated by Maria Antonietta Gambaro
...
Imagine then many others, noblemen and common people, warriors and
ladies, all those people who see and live the story we wish to tell
and with their voices, joined in chorus, they laugh and cry and
are frightened and amazed at the fantastic adventure of the knight
Lohengrin. And now a theater and an orchestra. Airy music which takes us far away and a curtain which opens on a wood on the banks of a river... |
Are children’s imaginations still set on fire looking
at a book with pictures? And in front of a curtain which opens?
At that time, the Emme editions were convinced of both things,
so much so that they overlapped them and dedicated one of their
series to the fairy tales and legends which appeared on the
stages of the opera. If instead you wish to stay |
An
opera can not be told, as aesthetics teaches us. But childhood
(our own just to start from) instead teaches us that the tales
of older people and of illustrated books can put us in touch with
a world which is fatal, upright and full of imagination, waiting
for the music which we too want to listen to... (...) Mara Cantoni doesn’t just tell the story, but really the story as it’s experienced on the stage. With the lights, spaces, mysterious sense of the stage and above all with the music of Wagner ... (Lorenzo Arruga, Il Giorno, 30 december 1979) |
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This is what Wagner told about more than one hundred years ago, but it’s said that Lohengrin had already been living for a long time.
Some say he’s still alive.