101 L’Antologia di Spoon River a Milano : Actualizations and Reinterpretations of a “Secular Oratorio”

The Spoon River Anthology, the famous collection by poet Edgar Lee Mas ters, was published in an Italian translation by Fernanda Pivano through Giulio Einaudi in 1943, while the war was still ongoing.Before it became one of the most successful post-war poetry books, composer Gino Negri adapted and reassembled some epitaphs from the collection into a secular oratorio, composed shortly after April 25, 1945, in a Milan still bearing the marks of destruction and bombing.In June 2024, three Milanese institutions -the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, the State University of Milan, and the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory -realized the first staged performance of Negri's work.This book chapter aims to delve into the multilayered interpretations of Gino Negri's work and, in particular, to highlight how this ap proach to the score, far from betraying it, actually enriches the historical perspec tive with new meanings.In doing so, it ideally continues the composer's own ap proach to Lee Masters' text, presenting a work open to the audience.