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Imaginary Diary (author's note)

The scene of Imaginary Diary is the mind of the actor who has often played the part of the protagonist in Molière's The imaginary Invalid. As in a dream, the actor often remembers fragments of questions, answers, meditations, comments, and «intermezzi», in a kind of interior monologue, or rather of interior self-commiseration. The actor has no interlocutors: he is alone with a double-bass continuo, which follows him like a shadow. The music is that which comes into his mind, progressively, as if he were imagining it. What he himself would choose if he were the director, to accompany the story he has so often interpreted. A music which, in fact, commiserates him, comments on him, and every now and then sings his praises. A music which makes him cry and laugh in an apparently incoherent fashion (especially in the Intermezzo, where the chief actor and Punchinello tend to be identified), which he has absorbed here and there in films, on the radio, at concerts and at the opera.

Imaginary Diary, therefore, is not so much an analysis of the Molière character as the chronicle of the thoughts of an actor who irreparably bears with him, shadow-like, that gigantic character.

Luciano Berio

[Notes edited in 1975 for the win at Premio Italia; published in Prix Italia illustrative program 1975, Torino, ERI-RAI 1975, s.p.]

Note d'autore: informazioni generali | Author's note: general info