Luci mie traditrici
Luci mie traditrici (My Traitorous Eyes) is an opera in two acts by Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, who also wrote the libretto. It premiered in German as Die tödliche Blume (The Deadly Flower) on May 19, 1998 at the Schwetzingen Festival in Germany.
The title comes from a line spoken by a countess in the work. The story centers on a couple named Malaspina—a surname from an Italian noble family that translates roughly as “evil thorn.” The opera lasts about 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Sciarrino began composing the piece in 1996. While writing, he learned that Alfred Schnittke was making an opera about the same murder (Carlo Gesualdo killing his wife and her lover). He then moved away from direct references to Gesualdo and instead drew on the play Il tradimento per l’onore by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini, and on an elegy by Claude Le Jeune based on a text by Pierre de Ronsard. The work is dedicated to Marilisa Pollini, wife of Maurizio Pollini.
After its Schwetzingen premiere, it has been staged at Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels and in New York (with choreography by Trisha Brown, 2001), as well as by Ensemble Risognanze (2003), at the Salzburg Festival (2008), the Berlin Festival of Contemporary Music (2010), a co-production between the Festival of Contemporary Art in Montepulciano (2010) and Oper Frankfurt (2011), and at the Berlin State Opera (2016).
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 14:29 (CET).