I Turcs tal Friùl

Alessandro Serra

The peasant who speaks his own dialect is the master of his entire reality.
Pier Paolo Pasolini

I Turcs tal Friùl is a tragedy.
In writing it, the young Pasolini drew inspiration from the oldest theatrical work in the Western tradition: “The Persians” by Aeschylus.

He composed it in a language learned as an adult, listening to peasants with a dictionary in hand.
It is not a phonetic text, but a poetic one — and therefore, in some sense, musical.
Every new staging bears the responsibility of inventing a soundscape capable of emancipating itself from any comforting vernacularism.

Pasolini spent his twenties in a fascist country occupied by Nazis: what was to be done?
Wait in church, praying, or take action among the forests and mountains?
He chose to remain, while his younger brother joined the partisans and was killed by fellow partisans.

In Turcs, Pauli stays behind, while his younger brother, Meni, goes to meet his death:
he returns as a corpse in a scene of perfect tragedy.

The polis is present in Turcs: the sacredness of the village gathered around the little church, a surrogate for the altar of Dionysus placed at the centre of the orchestra.
The horror of the invader destroys, violates, and enslaves.

Music permeates Turcs — sacred and Catholic throughout the work. Yet from within it emerges the Ottoman chant of the Turkish chorus, to which Pasolini dedicates his most lyrical verses.

Religious conflict runs through the work, but above all a musical opposition emerges between a Catholic culture of resignation and the sacred blasphemy of a people capable, the day after an earthquake, of numbering the stones and beginning to rebuild.

It is the same blasphemy uttered by Meni, echoed in the ending scene by Pauli who, before his brother’s corpse, with the last breath in his poor Christian chest, blasphemes against the Virgin Mary.

It is this Blasphemy that unleashes the terrible wind which halts the Turks.

The priest is left with only one word to say: Amen.

Alessandro Serra