Theater – Moonlight Sonata

MOONLIGHT SONATA By Yannis Ritsos

Actress Paola Morales – Music Ludwig van Beethoven

Tickets at this link.

Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) is one of the most influential poets of the Greek generation of 1930, analogous to the generation of ‘27 in Spain. The poets of that generation brought surrealism to Greek poetry, and, some like Ritsos, a clear political commitment, reflected in his poetry.

Ritsos, one of the greatest voices in European lyric poetry, created a series of monologues of exceptional beauty in which the pathos of Greek tragedy is conveyed.

With the Moonlight Sonata, considered one of the masterpieces of the Greek poet, he manages to articulate a text of maximum poetic efficiency and formal beauty, reaching one of the highest peaks of contemporary Greek poetry.»

SYNOPSIS

The Moonlight Sonata” is the story of a disappointment. A prose monologue in which a woman, addressing an invisible character, takes stock of her life in an atmosphere of desolation, deep melancholy, and darkness of the soul due to events occurring within and outside herself, including loneliness, the crisis of old values, or inexorable old age, while Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata is heard from the radio of a nearby cafe.

Apparently the author uses a harsh and cold perspective, but in truth, behind his words there is something of hope or rather illusion in that desperate “Let me go with you”, words that burst forth like a litany and are the profiles that sustain the poem. It only remains to be shown how theater can do it.