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Composer: Pizzetti, Ildebrando

The Making of Assassinio nella cattedrale

Raimondi, Ruggero

Morandi, Pier Giorgio

Mancini, Tiziano

Libretto/Text Author: Eliot, Thomas Stearns

Television Director: Mancini, Tiziano

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Narrator: Mancini, Tiziano

Narrator: Morandi, Pier Giorgio

Narrator: Raimondi, Ruggero

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Year of Production: 2006

Playing Time: 00:15:05

Catalogue Number: A00501028

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What more appropriate venue for Ildebrando Pizzetti's operatic masterwork of 1958 Assassinio nella Cattedrale than the austere, Romanic Basilica di San Nicola in the southern Italian port city of Bari. A striking coincidence: the action of T.S. Eliot's stage play Murder in the Cathedral, on which the opera is based, takes place in December 1170; the Basilica di San Nicola also dates from the 12th century and was consecrated in 1197.

Pizzetti, one of Italy's leading lyrical composers of the first half of the 20th century, composed several operas, of which Assassinio nella Cattedrale is one of his most famous. It unites all the elements of his lyrical style, including a supple arioso treatment of the text that bears echoes of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande and of Monteverdi and the Florentine monodists, and also powerful, surging choral movements that are even more breathtaking when performed in a church. Pizzetti's religiosity also manifests itself in his choice of T.S. Eliot's modern-day miracle play about St. Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who returns from a seven-year exile only to be confronted by various torments, including four temptations; he succumbs to the fourth, the temptation of martyrdom.

Internationally acclaimed bass-baritone Ruggero Raimondi, at home on all of the world's major stages and unforgotten as Don Giovanni in Joseph Losey's celebrated 1979 film, brings the firmness and authority of his vocal artistry to this role, elevating it to one of the most passionate and intriguing portrayals of a 20th-century operatic hero.