Pidgin to Creole

Danielle De Niese has just finished her performance as Despina in "Così Fan Tutte" at the New York Metropolitan Opera... true, true... my friend and music connoisseuse Miss O. says that Susanna Phillips, the other soprano and actual primadonna, has a more powerful voice. But De Niese sings the Italian lyrics with a spell -I hardly catch a few words- that transmutes the language into an unknown birdsong flashing plumage all around. A Sri-Lanka Burgher of Dutch descent, she embodies 'the creole' with reference to the linguistic paradigm: the overcoming of the pidgin, a plane displaced fusion of two or more linguistic components consequent to the relocation of European groups along colonial patterns in the ‘new worlds’. The creole, instead, is the language of new natives, generations after that fusion. Not a language one can adopt by will, it is a cultural confluence in which one is born, barring the way to ‘elective belonging’ geopolitical scenarios. Looking more closely, four out of the six characters of the piece have been sung by creole singers. When De Niese sings, though, ‘the creole’ unfolds as an enhanced mode with broader potential than the sum of its generative components. As for Mozart’s opera staging, the recent architecture scene has been shaped by numerous interpreters, who have diffusely re-paradigmed a series of new worlds.