What a pair! Brother Adam & Sister Eve!

JOSEF MYSLIVEČEK — ADAMO & EVA — IL GARDELLINO — ORATORIO A 4 VOCI — 2018–2019

The three Abrahamic religions, in chronological order Judaism, Christianity, and Islam always have to come back to the myth of Adam and Eve that states the whole of humanity today is the result of an enormous inbreeding between one man and one woman. This is so absurd that not so many people really worked on the hypothesis. Some painters with some sexy images, some sculptors with some sexy statues, and some literary people with some metaphorical stories on the simple line of these two fictional characters. And faith has nothing to do with it. It is the unhealthiest story I know, with brothers and sisters practicing incest, not out of choice but only by obligation. Imagine the state of humanity after three generations of this incestuous inbreeding. Luckily, God gave them everything, but inbreeding led them to betray everything moral, and all ethical behavior, and how could they be different, how could they know reason and morals when they were forced to do what is absolutely against nature? Most animals in the wild would not do it. Imagine the amplification of this incest after Noah and his ark in which he only took one male and one female of each animal species!

Joszef Mysliveček does a very good job with this myth. And yet I do not feel it as clearly as I would have liked to. Adamo is a tenor. Why not? Eve is a mezzo-soprano, and there I disagree. She should have been a soprano, and a high-pitched soprano at that. The two angels are soprani, and that is not what I would have liked, in this ancient 18th-century Italy. Angels are not sexually specified. So, they should have been castrati with slightly different voices, similar and yet one more aerial and the other slightly more raucous, and in the modern world two countertenors would have been perfect. When you listen without following the words in the booklet, you can hardly find out just by listening who is Eva, who is the Angelo di Giustizia, and who is the Angelo di Misericordia. And worst of all, there is no God in this Eden, and that is missing. In the Biblical myth of the original sin, there is no God either, but that makes God a pure phantasm and the angels are the only voices of this God who is nothing but an empty spot. A conspiracy of the…