Camerata Mediolanense - Hermaphroditus Official Music Video

“The song is based on the thirty-third emblem of the treatise “Atalanta Fugiens” written by the German alchemist Michael Maier (1617). The Hermaphrodite, also called rebis (“double thing”), is the fruit of a chemical marriage between opposites: the masculine and the feminine, naturally, but also the sun and the moon, the heat and the cold, the blood and the milk, gold and silver, or even, as in this passage, Sulfur and Mercury. The Hermaphrodite is therefore divine perfection, achieved at the cost of unspeakable suffering that underlies the process of transformation of derangement into stillness, and underlies the conflict between delirium and reason. Musically, a timeless voice starts the tormented alchemical process generated by the two choirs and the two harpsichords. The direction of the music is clear and neat, but at the end the funeral march of the horns makes its way. “ ---- Elena Previdi/Camerata Mediolanense