Acoustic installation –I Canti Orfici by Dino Campana according to Carmelo Bene at Chiesa di Santa Maria dell’Angelo.

Twenty years without Bene is an acoustic installation dedicated to Carmelo Bene twenty years after his death.

A tribute to one of the greatest theatre men and to Dino Campana, the poet from Marradi, who immortalized the city of Faenza in many of his lyrics.

We offer the audience a thoughtful selection of the work of Carmelo Bene and Dino Campana, published by Bompiani in 1999, in an unusual ambience. The audience sits in total darkness and listens to Bene’s voice singing Campana’s lyrics.

Four loudspeakers guarantee an all-embracing and captivating listening, that enhances the dreamlike and visionary dimension of Campana’s poetry and the sound and musical quality of Bene’s voice.

An installation-concert for solo voice, minimal and evocative, bare and powerful, which borrows from Bene’s experiments on phoné and offers the audience a journey into Dino Campana’s verse in their doing and undoing of pure orality.

I Canti Orfici

I Canti Orfici by Dino Campana represented for Carmelo Bene an ideal frame to test his research on phoné over more than twenty years.

The discovery of Campana by Bene dates back to the early 1960s, but it was only in 1982 when Bene first performed I Canti Orfici in the form of a concert. Since then, Campana’s masterpiece was recorded several times on stage, radio, and television up to the publication of Carmelo Bene’s book Dino Campana I Canti Orfici, published by Bompiani in 1999.

On the one hand, Carmelo Bene’s insistence on the variations around the work of Dino Campana reflects his critical and poetic need to source from poetry in its making and subtract it from the idea of the oral dead. On the other hand, it reflects the troubled literary genesis of this poetical work. Composed in 1913 under the title Il più lungo giorno, it was rewritten and printed the following year, after the loss of the original manuscript (which will only be found in 1971). It was printed again in 1928 without the author’s consent with significant variations, and again in 1928 in a new edition, more faithful to the first draft.

Dino Campana died in an asylum in Florence in 1932. His fortune as a poet and his appreciation among the great poets of the twentieth century is inextricably linked to Carmelo Bene’s work and research.