In Questa Reggia
Maria Callas
In This Palace
In this palace, now a thousand years and a thousand,
A desperate cry resounded.
And that cry, through generations and generations,
Here in my soul took refuge!
Princess Lo-U-Ling, sweet and serene grandmother
Who reigned in your dark silence
In pure joy, and you defied unyielding and sure
The harsh dominion, now you live again in me!
(It was when the King of the Tartars unfurled his seven banners...)
Even in the time that everyone remembers,
there was dismay and terror and the sound of weapons.
The kingdom conquered! And Lou-Ling,
My grandmother, dragged by a man like you,
like you a stranger, there in the atrocious night
where her fresh voice faded away!
(For centuries she sleeps in her huge tomb...)
O Princes, who in long caravans
from every part of the world come here
to cast your fate,
I avenge on you, on you that purity,
that cry and that death!
No one will have me!
The horror of what killed her lives in my heart!
No, no! No one will have me!
Ah, the pride of such purity is reborn in me!
Stranger! Do not tempt fate!
The riddles are three, death is one!
