PIER LUIGI PIZZI a decade of stage design and artistic direction

From Baroque theatre to an erudite journey of Masonic

initiation rite through transgression and reason, exoticism, myth and fable.

Text by Ivana D’Agostino

The decade of stage design and artistic direction here considered is done so through a sampling of

works regarded as significant in supporting the theory introduced by the title: that is, the passage

from the exhilarating, grandiloquent opulence of the scenery and the abundance of “surprise

elements” inherent in Baroque theatre to the essentiality of the message, albeit rich in symbolic

citations, expressed in the erudite journey of the Masonic initiation rite, the overall theme for the

operas billed for the 2006 edition of the Sferisterio Opera Festival, annually held in Macerata, Italy.

A refining process of the visual language that conforms to the nobility of meanings implicit -

expiation-redemption, catharsis, extreme sacrifice in the pursuit of absolute values - themes

previously touched upon in two productions: The Magic Flute for the Rome Opera House and

Tancredi for the Rossini Opera Festival, respectively staged in 2001 and 1999. If the 2001 staging

of The Magic Flute appears greatly different from the Sferisterio edition in that the sacredness of

the priests who, at Macerata, subject Tamino to a philological initiation rite of the firstdegree, in

Tancredi the solemn monumentality of the scenic apparatus corresponds to the ideals of

Enlightenment contained in Voltaire’s text; of which the tragic finale was revived at the Rossini

Opera Festival in Pesaro, contemplated at Brescia in Rossini’s version, in the archive of Count

Luigi Lechi. The death of Tancredi, rendered yet more dramatic by the raked platform on which it

occurs, in the appreciation of the love for one’s country as an end superior to his love for Amenaide,

considers directing and design solutions relative to the rigours of Enlightenment antecedent to those

adopted at Macerata.

The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Direction, sets and costumes by Pier Luigi Pizzi

Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, 2001.

Tancredi by Gioachino Rossini

Direction, sets and costumes by Pier Luigi Pizzi Pesaro, Rossini Opera Festival, 1999

But the path towards superior levels of knowledge presented at Macerata from the underlying theme

programmed for the 2006 season at the Sferisterio, including operas such as The Magic Flute, Aida

and Turandot, a repertoire of lyric opera in which, as a counterpoint, appear Ferruccio Busoni’s

Thamos König in Ägypten and Turandot, regards musicians whose works were written between the

end of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. A chronological

span amply diversified and full of stylistic and literary suggestions alluding to the rigours of

Enlightenment, and to Egyptian and Chinese exoticisms, contiguous to pastoral dramas often

combined with Baroque manoeuvres: an eclectic repertoire of the late-eighteenth century, that the

successive Universal Exhibitions of the nineteenth century opened up to new exotic cultures, to

fresh mysteries and fantastic subjects. Those same subjects that, reinterpreted by decadent

symbolism between sensuality and sin, were often radically modernized by new, more ironically

transgressional texts of twentieth-century theatre. This was a period of time which nevertheless

stretched beyond the limits of 1926, the year in which Puccini’s Turandot was staged with

Invitation au voyage, the recital held at the Lauro Rossi theatre, which closed the Festival season at

Macerata. Invitation au voyage, as interpreted by the Sferisterio’s artistic director Pier Luigi Pizzi,

is a compendium, an epitome of music and literature on the lines of Baudelaire’s Parnassian poetry,

from which it takes its title. From the pieces of music selected by maestro Pizzi together with the

baritone Alfonso Antoniozzi, an ideal fusion of the arts is traced; with Duparc-Baudelaire as the

starting-point, through Rossini-Metastasio, Bizet, Poulenc, Satie and Cole Porter we are taken on a

full-scale exotic and spiritual journey, certainly consistent with the 2006 Festival of Macerata

project, not least with Pizzi’s concept of the all-round planning and design of a stage production: a

concept already prevalent in Baroque theatre, having found fresh impetus in the syncretism among

the arts of the late-nineteenth century, then imbued with a markedly radical vigour as it evolved into

the avant-garde of the twentieth century.

Aida by Giuseppe Verdi

Direction, sets and costumes by Massimo Gasparon

Macerata, Sferisterio Opera Festival, 2006

Turandot by Giacomo Puccini

Direction, sets and costumes by Pier Luigi Pizzi

Macerata, Sferisterio Opera Festival, 2006

Within this logic, and following a lengthy collaboration with Strehler, De Lullo and Ronconi,

Pizzi’s directorial achievement, already well-established by 1977, was not incidental. Channelled

through one individual’s interpretation of the drama, the production thus conforms to a stylistic

unity, endowing it with a precise reading - of both text and scene - such as to render it consistent in

all its parts and recognisable in its singularity.

In this sense the choice of a technical team is vital: the visual effects on stage would not be so if it

were not for Sergio Rossi’s lighting, the costumes would not drape properly if Pizzi were not

supervising the selection of fabrics and the costumes were not built by long-established houses such

as Rome-based Tirelli, the wardrobe department of the Arena di Verona or the atelier of Elvia

Mengoni, who supervised the costumes for Aida designed by Massimo Gasparon.

Choreography, of such relevance in Baroque and avant-garde theatre, contrary to the current

tendency to consider dance a “minor event” in theatre, also assumes a just prominence in Pizzi’s

artistic direction. George Janku’s choreography for Aida, Egyptian-style with a dancer’s twirling of

veils à la Loie Füller in the triumph of Radamès in the second act, as well as his choreography for

Turandot, are preceded by those for the 1997 Macbeth and for the 2005 production of La Gioconda,

both staged at the Arena di Verona. Just as prominent, Janku’s choreography for Thaïs, Le domino

noir and Les pêcheurs de perles, at the Malibran in Venice, staged respectively in 2002, 2003 and

2004 (Thaïs is also programmed for La Fenice for the 2006-2007 season), further underline Pier

Luigi Pizzi’s readiness to give due prominence and validity to dance, where appropriate, as an

integral part of a production.

The importance attributed to the lighting and to the use of the body to express inner moods, coupled

with the creation of texts that are ever more radically irreverent and unconventional, can be traced

back to the undeniable theatrical experience of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Along these lines

moves La pietra del paragon billed at the Rossini Opera Festival in 2002. The party atmosphere

populated by guests in elegant seventies-style dress, who mingle in the Rationalist villa and its

grounds, cast Rossini’s sophisticated light opera in a modern context, using modern directing

techniques, mediated by twentieth-century painting. Paintings by Burri hung in the villa belonging

to Count Asdrubale reflect Pizzi’s taste for cultural and aesthetic appreciation that is not confined to

antiquarianism, a predilection already evident in the exposition of his collection of contemporary

art, at Bibbiena in 1996 (1), which includes works by Casorati, Sironi and Manzù. The choices

made at the Lauro Rossi theatre during the 2005 Macerata season, however, were more radical,

partly for the adoption of texts from avant-garde theatre, such as Cocteau’s Le bel indifferent, and

Les mamelles de Tirésias by Francis Poulenc – who took inspiration from the text of the same title

written in 1903 by Apollinaire. The inclusion of these two productions in the 2006 programme

clearly represents a kind of warm up to the innovative Turandot by Ferruccio Busoni: a musician of

European scope not by chance esteemed by artists of the avant-garde.

Umberto Boccioni, who was a friend of his, painted his portrait in 1914, and Feininger, one of the

most sophisticated experts on Bach, at the Bauhaus in Weimer around 1920, loved to play “ll

clavicembalo ben temperato” on the organ in his studio, in the version by Bach that Busoni had

given him. Macerata with Busoni worthily continues the openings on twentieth century theatre

begun in 2005. These choices indicate Pizzi’s ever expanding horizon towards new objectives in

research, as he already showed previously with the adaptation of the text of Le bel indifferent, the

fruit of his collaboration with the musician Marco Tutino.

Les Pêcheurs de perles by Georges Bizet

Direction, sets and costumes by Pier Luigi Pizzi

Venice, Teatro Malibran, 2004

Pizzi teaming up with Tutino evidently creates a precedent in the above-mentioned recent

collaboration between Pizzi and the baritone Antoniozzi, for the selection of musical passages from

Invitation au voyage. Thus the principle of a creative unity between theatre, music, painting,

melodrama and dance increasingly finds a basis: a programme comprised of a synthesis of genres,

leading to a fusion of the arts largely between Baroque theatre, late nineteenth century culture and

the more extreme frontiers of the European avant-garde, can also be put into act today, on condition

that there is a sharing of ideas to set inmotion the means for renewal.

The development of the analysis on Pizzi’s work in a decade of theatrical productions, as this essay

is unable to view the work of this maestro in its entirety, is a basic prerequisite in appreciating that

the Sferisterio Opera Festival di Macerata 2006 season is the result of successive phases,

productions and artistic direction embracing multiplicity, geared towards an increasingly whole and

unifying method of staging a complete production, impossible to achieve or at best realized only in

part without the coordination of the various expressive languages governed by the single project.

With this new outlook, given a definite artistic direction, the Macerata programme of last year has

acquired a European scope of a Festival, following the 2004 and 2005 editions that hinted at things

to come through Pizzi’s artistic direction of Les contes d’Hoffmann, Les mamelles de Tirésias and

Le bel indifferent.

The European atmosphere that pervades these operas takes us back to Armide, the tragédie lyrique

by Cristoph Willibald Gluck from which forms the basis of our analysis. Staged twice, in 1996 and

in 1999, at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Gluck’s opera expresses the centrality of a key work, a

perfect exercise in late eighteenth-century Baroque theatre modernised by the Enlightenment

sensibilities of Rousseau and Diderot. On the eve of the French Revolution – the opera was first

staged in 1777 – the dramaturgical thread of Quinault’s libretto, in putting forth universal

sentiments common to all, established a model of European theatre that went beyond the

nationalistic tendencies of that time.

Armide di Cristoph Willibald Gluck

Direction, sets and costumes by Pier Luigi Pizzi Milano, Teatro alla Scala, 1996.

Foto Lelli and Masotti

Coherent with this interpretation, Enlightenment and Baroque grandiloquence coexist in Armide,

defined by Pizzi himself as an “evidently cultural space” (2). And it undoubtedly is, constituting a

kind of drive- belt for the stage productions and exhibitions that take place both before and after. An

element unifying the entire development of Armide is the “Baroque picture-gallery”: a scenic frame

of seventeenth-century paintings, evocative of the erudition of the period that gave form to the

space of the Grand Galerie.

The taste for a collection of European elements that marks this stage design is closely connected to

Pizzi’s interest in seventeenth century painting, as demonstrates his own important seventeenth- and

eighteenth century collection (3): possessing a thorough knowledge, fundamental for the mounting

of the exhibitions on the seventeenth century curated by him at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1988-

1989 with Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée, and in Genoa in 2000-2001 with “El siglo de los

genoveses”.

Armide di Cristoph Willibald Gluck

Direction, sets and costumes by Pier Luigi Pizzi Milano, Teatro alla Scala, 1996.

Foto Lelli and Masotti

Pizzi’s brand of unstinting professionalism in mounting these great exhibitions is no different, for

the care with which he dedicates to every single detail, to that employed in his stage productions.

The symbolism of the five senses in Flemish painting, taken up in Armide as an underlying theme

throughout the entire opera, in the fourth act interprets, with food representing the sense of taste, the

seductive intentions of Lucinde and Mélisse. Before being staged at La Scala, the 1992 staging of

Armide in the theatre at the luxurious palace of Versailles - an ideal location, rather than Paris, to

commemorate the ostentations of the Sun-King - Pier Luigi Pizzi, in 1994, mounted the

extraordinary exhibition entitled “Les tables royales en Europe”(4); a reflection of the sumptuously

laid tables depicted also resurfaces in Armide, in the table that appears from beneath the stage. The

mounting of the exhibitions entitled “Magnificenza alla corte dei Medici” (1997-1998) in Florence,

“La Civiltà dell’Ottocento” (1997) in Naples, and the exhibition on “Divina Eleonora” in 2001 at

the Fondazione Cini in Venice, though considered from different eras, all share the same grandeur

that is celebrated in Gluck’s opera, and are equally attentive to the aristocracy’s etiquette of

observing appearances, which from the courts increasingly extended to theatre and the visual arts.

Clearly fundamental in delineating an entire Baroque season, which epitomizes and anticipates

future developments that go way beyond the limits of the “rationalised Baroque” perceived by

Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Armide coordinates a variety of Baroque productions that precede it.

Among these are cited those for Vivaldi’s Orlando Furioso, staged at the Teatro Filarmonico,

Verona in 1978, and Händel’s Ariodante at the Piccola Scala, Milan in 1981, then staged in Reggio

Emilia in 1982 and in Nancy in 1983. Also of note, Les Indes Galantes at the Théâtre Châtelet in

Paris and then at La Fenice, Venice, and Hippolyte et Aricie in Aix-en-Provence, both staged in

1983 and both set to music by Jean Philippe Rameau. Also set to music by Handel, the Rinaldo

staged soon after, in 1985, in the Teatro Valle, Reggio Emilia, reveals an key fulcrum of reference

in that period “for the enjoyable rediscovery of great theatre”.

With Bach’s oratory, St. John Passion, produced the previous year at La Fenice in Venice, a work

considered to be ”l’un des plus beaux spectacles de Pizzi” (5), the lighting and the plastic poses of

the bodies on the three crucifixes immediately call to mind great paintings by Caravaggio and

Rembrandt. The prominence also given to the decoration of the altars and the Baroque carriages in

the Passion, which articulate the cultural and aesthetic nature of research, the apex of which is

always Armide; but it is also in the use of the space, here expanded from the stage area to the entire

auditorium of La Fenice, that we perceive a new requisite. The same need that induced Pizzi to

create the extended forestage between the stage front and the audience – enclosing the orchestra in

the intermediate space – at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro for La pietra del paragon in 2002

and for Le nozze di Teti e Peleo in 2001. Spatial solutions to be considered as the precedents closest

to the work of restoration, on Pier Luigi Pizzi’s behest, of the stage area of the Sferisterio in

Macerata; now at a more raised level with respect to the previous, in order to meet new technical

requirements, and extended in depth by a hundred metres so as to facilitate the movements of a

massed cast, which with this year’s Aida reached a total of a hundred and fifty performers on stage.

As in Le nozze di Teti e Peleo, the last among Pizzi’s Baroque operas taken into consideration, it is

still the echo of Armide to direct the flurries and triumphs of this musical fable of Rossini, the

grandiose magnificence of which, however, is already confronted with the solemn loftiness of

Jacques Louis David, in the apotheosis, of an evidently Napoleonic taste, of the marriage of Thetys

and Peleus.

And with David the Enlightenment philosophy of European culture makes an entrance - to which

Gluck, too, adheres, though in moderation - shared by the most advanced minds of that period.

The architect Ennemond Petitot soon counted himself among them, with the project for the Parco

Ducale in Parma, in which he realized a rare example, within an urban area, of a Frenchstyle garden

of harmonious proportions. Pizzi, for the Armide garden plans the Cartesian space of a geometric

labyrinth.

The principle that governs the idea of “natura artificialis” leads him to use the chorus while

expunging it of every human semblance. To extraordinary visual effect, only the heads of the

singers appear above the hedges, adorned with headdresses that make them seem a fitting arboreal

completion to the “rationalised garden” of Armide. This garden, new among the solutions gleaned

from neoclassical architecture, introduces a more radical idea to his stage design. Gluck’s opera, as

we see, in a key way coordinates two decades of theatre productions and exhibitions inspired by the

Baroque. But the garden of Armide, which is an intellectual space, ordered by the precise layout of

Petitot – Pizzi, in 1997, following Armide, curates the mounting of the exhibition entitled: Petitot:

un artista del Settecento a Parma - carves out from the context of the opera his own niche,

indicative of future research.

Way before the garden of Armide, a hint of the spatial solutions and the innovative embellishments

of Petitot, is to be found in the edition of Rossini’s Semiramide staged in 1980 at the Festival of

Aix-en-Provence. If, in the triangular form created by Pizzi for the temple behind Arsace, is

refigured a Canovian model - progressively devoid of any plastic attribute in the passage from here

to its reinvention in the temple of Iside in Gasparon’s designs for Aida at Macerata - the costumes

for Semiramide, clothing characters stiff in statue-like poses, instead realize in full the three

dimensional models suggested by the architect Petitot in his illustrations on “Mascarades à la

greque”(6).

With Thaïs by Massenet, a comédie lyrique first staged at the Paris Opéra in 1894, we enter into the

decadent climate of Orientalist inspiration so dear to late nineteenth-century culture. The essence of

which is traced in the novel by Anatole France, which goes back to the atmosphere of a Graecizing

Alexandria, then picked up in the libretto by Gallet. In Thaïs, in the dance of Afrodite the dancers’

graceful poses evoke the stylised gods and heroes of Greek vase paintings, motifs of great interest at

that time, as was the new direction taken in modern dance by Isadora Duncan.

Thaïs by Jules Massenet

Direction, sets and costumes by Pier Luigi Pizzi

Venice, Teatro Malibran, 2002

Thaïs by Jules Massenet

Direction, sets and costumes by Pier Luigi Pizzi

Venice, Teatro Malibran, 2002

Pizzi’s trilogy realized between 2002 and 2004 for the Malibran theatre which, in addition to Thaïs

includes Les Pêcheurs de perles and Le domino noir, newly reinforces this artist’s interest in

European theatre with its exotic and mythical subjects, then so popular in France, which drew ideas

from adventure stories, from decadent literature and from new scenarios presented by the Universal

Exhibitions. Not by chance, one thinks, for its mystery and the sensuality in line with what the late-

nineteenth-century collective imagination drew from the Orient, was the restaging of Les Pêcheurs

after twenty years absence, specifically at the time of the prestigious Universal Exhibition of Paris

in 1889. From these three operas numerous cues can be drawn that link themselves to Macerata: the

fresh impulse given to dance to highlight evocative moments of visual and psychological power, a

direct strand that serves as a bridge between the fables of Le Pêcheurs and Turandot, through the

white veil that conceals from the eye the purity of the priestess Leila to those red, doublelayered

veils among which appears Turandot in the first act; the choice of operas rarely seen in public, such

as Le domino noir, given a splendid Déco dressing, precursor to the Chinese-lacquer red cabinet

from Expo 1925, of the mobile background of Turandot. The preference given by the Malibran in

Venice to Le domino noir - highly sophisticated in its drawing of inspiration from Behrens and from

capes designed by Erté and Poiret for the nun’s habits of the third act – does not distance itself from

that of the Lauro Rossi Theatre in Macerata between 2005 and last year, which brought texts of

great subtlety, such as Les mamelles de Tirésias, Le bel indifferent and the reading in German for

singers and orchestra of the above-mentioned Turandot by Ferruccio Busoni. The philological

rigour with which Pizzi also handles the text, by usually privileging the original version, puts back

on track the decade of stage design and artistic direction that he considers, bringing us back to

Armide.

The reintegration of the fourth act of Gluck’s opera, usually cut as considered “incidental to the

main story-line”, is totally cohesive with the treatment given to Les contes d’Hoffmann, staged at

Macerata in 2004, following the “traditional version” of 1907 and which does include the fourth act.

A consistency that does not even waver from the logic adopted at Pesaro for the 1999 edition of

Rossini’s Tancredi: a heroic melodrama brought back to the level of Voltairean heights that had

inspired him to reintegrate the text with its original tragic finale.

The clarity in the planning of Tancredi(7), architecture which is space but also place of rational

thought, together with The Magic Flute for the Rome Opera House staged in 2001, were viewed as

the authoritative precedents of the path towards knowledge, symbolically expressed in the works

chosen for the 2006 season of the Sferisterio Opera Festival of Macerata.

The Enlightenment concept of the tragedy Tancréde, which inspired Tancredi, also guides the

sapiential journey of Masonic inspiration undertaken by Tamino in order to reach the light. Codified

in the detailed initiation ceremony of the first-degree to which the new brothers are submitted as

they gain entry to the Lodge, faithfully reconstructed by Pizzi with the help of Guido Biscuolo, The

Magic Flute staged at Macerata reinvests the opera with all the didactic meaning that Mozart

attributes to it. The search for truth within a superior order, achievable only by accepting the trials

necessary in order to attain it – this in synthesis is the narrative framework of Mozart’s Flute -

unifies in a single project all the operas billed at Macerata.

The Thamos, closely linked with, yet written prior to the Flute, sanctions and makes official

Mozart’s Masonic faith as he joined the Zur Wohltätigkeit Masonic Lodge in Vienna, in 1774. In

Aida, too, the pyramid structure that forms a backdrop in the previously mentioned scene, with its

access door suggestive of the threshold, that which marks the passage towards transcendental

heights, is strongly suggestive of Canova’s tomb for Maria Cristina of Austria, the design of which

was full of symbols taken from “the art of masonry”, and is ascribed to the Masonic ideals shared

by Antonio Canova himself.

In Verdi’s opera, another director’s solution by Massimo Gasparon to visually emphasise the design

aspects of the temple is that adopted for the choreographies of the Egyptian guards, in the crossed

movements of their lances that open up and meet to form a compass in the scene that closes the

second act.

Of great interest is Pizzi’s choice of artistic direction in inserting as a counterpoint to Puccini’s

Turandot the lesser known Turandot by Ferruccio Busoni; the distance taken by this musician from

Lucca is not measured solely by his tighter adherence to the text of Gozzi’s fable.

Puccini’s Turandot also moves in line with the directives of the Macerata project: here, the

psychological complexity of the heroine takes on the lights and the shadows of her soul tormented

by the opposing sentiments of hate and passion. The Goddess Kannon, seated at the central door of

the scene’s modelled backdrop in Deco style à la Schliepstein, symbolises the compassionate nature

of this Chinese female divinity, whose vow was that of not reaching Nirvana while there were still

souls wandering in torment. The stage entrances and exits of Turandot, whose cathartic journey

towards redemption through love appears to be symbolically guided by the protective wing of this

goddess, principally take place through this opening; another threshold, like that of the temple of

Aida, to signify the attainment of a superior vision, made possible only through a necessary process

of purification. In Turandot this is symbolically suggested by the change in colour of her costume

from red to the white of the gown of the third act, and by the lighting by light-designer Sergio Rossi

to Pier Luigi Pizzi’s specification, who uses an effective range of reds and violet to both interpret

and emphasise the horror experienced by the Chinese populace and the crowd movements; these

chromatic effects thus bringing to mind the sunsets on Me-Num painted by Galileo Chini during his

voyage in Siam. In this digression on Pizzi, Turandot takes on a relevant role for the modern

conception of directorial and visual solutions implemented, that are of considerable cultural impact

and depth.

The opera’s striking chromatic effects receive greater emphasis in the use of lighting: the effects of

blood being shed in the first and second acts, alluding to the cruel nature of the princess, are

splendid, and beautiful indeed is the procession of lanterns, filing in doubleline across the stage.

This not only recalls the nocturnal parades of the Bauhaus festival of lanterns but also the Chinese

lanterns that invade the stage in another Turandot by Pizzi, in 1969(8), directed by Luigi Squarzina.

The death of Liù also finds the right epilogue in the lighting, in the sharply distinct separation of the

finale between the darkness in which half the stage is confined and the livid colour that illuminates

with solemn composure the other half of the space reserved for action: the coffin raised, the long

procession silently accompanies offstage the maiden who sacrificed herself for love.

But another love, finally experienced, is that of Turandot, whose vocal breaks of Fauvist colouring,

tending towards melodious innovations not unlike those to be found in Chini’s paintings(9),

accentuate the character’s same existential and problematic nature common to the new heroines of

late-nineteenth-century melodrama. The sentiment finally fulfilled between Turandot and Calaf puts

into motion a director’s modern solutions of great emotional intensity. We are by now very far from

the cold abstraction of the love expressed in the singing of “Le plaisir” in Armide, the lofty style of

which converted pleasure into the prescribed model of ecstasy accepted by the culture of that epoch.

The embraces between Turandot and Calef by contrast communicate the feeling of a real passion.

The way in which he holds her and lifts her while seized with joy, to which Turandot finally

abandons herself to happiness – barefoot and radiantly beautiful, of an elegance devoid of frills,

framed only by her waist-length hair worn loose – makes of her a present-day character that goes

beyond the limits imposed by twentieth-century mores. Also in Aida, Gasparon’s direction throws

light on the love between the Ethiopian slave and Radamès, opening and closing the opera with the

long embrace between the two. Aida’s sacrifice leads Radamès to perceive the way towards a new

awareness that he will search for alone, as indicated by the final scene, which frames him with his

back to the audience, his arms raised towards the temple of Iside. By contrast, in Turandot, the

death of Liù allows the lead characters to journey together, analogous to that which happens with

Tamino and Pamina in The Magic Flute, the spiritual path of ascesis, the reward being the light and

the knowledge of universal love.

A value that, in its being without boundaries, involves love in both its basest aspects, defined in the

combination seduction-perdition, and its more elevated aspects, accessible only to those who tend

towards a pure and absolute love. Within this logic lies the underlying theme of the voyage towards

the light that had inspired the 2006 Festival of Macerata, in which the chosen operas develop a

narrative that is circular in form, as does this essay. Beginning with Armide, “the enchantress that

bewitches for ever those who look upon her”, but from whose spells Renaud frees himself thereby

bringing about her end, one concludes, so to recommence, ideally without delay, with Turandot.

The bloodthirsty cruelty of the princess cuts no ice in the confrontation with Calaf, against whom

she is unable to triumph, she herself remaining vanquished by his sentiment, much stronger than the

hate that imprisoned her heart.

Notes:

1. Pizzi’s interest in contemporary painting, generated, in addition to his studying architecture, by his

attending the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, is mentioned by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco in his

recollection of the scenographer’s time spent in Rome between 1950 and the late 1960s. Already in

possession of a number of important paintings by twentieth-century masters, his acquaintance with artists

from Rome’s Piazza del Popolo and others, based on a shared passion for the arts, led him to widen the scope

of his contemporary collection with new acquisitions by Schifano, Fabrizio Clerici, Vespignani and Lorenzo

Tornabuoni. Pizzi’s collection of contemporary art, in like manner his prestigious collection of seventeenth-

and eighteenth-century paintings, transmits through his choice of paintings from Metaphysics, twentieth-

century style, and Schifano’s acrylics his taste for collecting which, according to Antonio Paulucci and of

which I am in complete agreement, uniquely belongs to the “majestic class of the pure connoisseur”; M.

Fagiolo dell’Arco, Un “Grande stregone” amico della pittura, in “La Collezione Pizzi. Una Quadreria del

Seicento” (exhibition catalogue), Parma 1998, p.104; A. Paolucci, Come in uno specchio, in “La collezione

Pizzi” quoted, p.15.

2. A. Triola, A colloquio con Pier Luigi Pizzi, in “Armide” (theatre booklet), ed. Teatro alla Scala, Milan

1996, p. 114.

3. Pier Luigi Pizzi’s collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European art, put together

with a sharp eye to quality and beauty, encapsulates the artist’s aesthetic and cultural universe

recreated by his Baroque theatre productions. Given a high profile in Armide, the importance given

to painting within Pizzi’s scenery is evident long before its manifestation in his collections of

antique and contemporary art. In Goldoni’s L’avaro, staged in 1951 at the Fenice in Venice, when

Pizzi was a very young man, he communicated the lead character’s vice of miserliness by making

him cover the paintings in his house with heavy curtains, so as to protect them from the ruinous

menace represented by the light. By contrast, the much more spectacular proportions of the effect

created by large paintings enclosed in golden frames “among the dull spaces of the walls” that

descend from above in the first and second acts of Verdi’s Nabucco, for the Maggio Fiorentino in

1977. The pleasure that Pizzi derives from art is also fully expressed in his mounting of large

exhibitions, some of which are mentioned in this essay, so scrupulous in recreating the spirit of the

age in which these works originated, restructured from iconographic sources provided by the

paintings themselves and by the visual arts.

Historical paintings from Pier Luigi Pizzi’s collection were exhibited in Parma in 1998, and in 2000

in Corsica at the Musée Fesch. Information on the collection in: La collezione Pizzi. “Una

Quadreria del Seicento” (exhibition catalogue) quoted.; “Les Arts en Scene. Una Quadreria del

Seicento” (exhibition catalogue - Ville d’Ajaccio, Musée Fesch), ed. FMR, Milan 2000.

Additional information on designs for the stage and exhibitions mentioned in this note in: “Pier

Luigi Pizzi alla Fenice” (curated by M. Ida Biggi), Marsilio ed., Venezia 2005, p.18; “Pier Luigi

Pizzi. Inventore di teatro” (curated by L. Arruga), Allemandi ed., Torino 2006.[a richly illustrated

Nabucco on pges. 85-93].

4. From this exhibition in which “the fake and the plausible alternate with the authentic, precious

china and glassware and the sumptuous ornamentation” (M. Fagiolo dell’Arco), the intellectual

pleasure gleaned from the display of food symbolically representing European court life is clearly

evident. The care with which Pizzi dedicates to the laying of the tables modelled on the lavish style

of Flemish sumptuously laid tables is again evident in the “extraordinary laid tables” of the 1997

exhibition in Florence entitled “Magnificenza alla Corte dei Medici”. The adorned tables featured in

the exhibition on nineteenth-century culture entitled “Civiltà dell’Ottocento”, held in Naples in that

same year, by contrast display a measured sobriety conforming to the neoclassical style. On the

Versailles exhibition there is ample documentation in: “Versailles et les tables royales en Europe:

XVII ème – XIX ème siècles: Musée national de châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon”, Paris 1993.

5. D. Fernandez, Pizzi le Magnifique, in “Les Arts en Scene” quoted, p.11.

6. References to the operas in Rossini’s “serious repertoire”, specifically the Semiramide of 1980,

are given by Lorenzo Arruga, who attended the first night of Aix-en-Provence. Of this legendary

evening he says: “At the first performance, the rain fell during the duet by Semiramide and Arsace

in the second act. The stage area, though covered, became waterlogged, but we knew immediately

that the show would go on. A heavy, incessant rain drenched those of us out in the open, but no-one

ran for shelter. It felt as if we were all an allegory of the music.”

Arruga’s account, from which this passage on Semiramide is taken, neatly summarizes Pier Luigi

Pizzi’s entire artistic career from its beginnings to the present day. The book from which this

passage is taken, richly illustrated and subdivided into topics related to various themes, at last

providing us with a chronologically complete spectrum of Pizzi’s stage productions, constitutes an

indispensable reference source that is no longer fragmentary on this Milanese director-designer’s

stage productions: “Pier Luigi Pizzi. Inventore di teatro” (curated by L. Arruga), Marsilio ed.,

Torino 2006.

7. Pizzi’s sets for Tancredi for the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro number three. In the first two

productions – the first staged in 1982 in neo-Gothic style, resplendent with its transparent glass

panels, the second produced in 1991, immersed in an atmosphere of Medieval jousting tournaments

- the corresponding architecture of the sets is appropriate to the two different finales with a happy

ending written by the author. The 1999 production, in favouring the tragic finale of Tancredi as

conceived by Rossigni from the archive of Count Lechi consequently inspires Pizzi to design

scenery that conforms to the moral significance that underpins the work. Information and

photographs illustrating the sets from 1982 and 1991 in “Pier Luigi Pizzi. Inventore di teatro”

quoted, p.229; pges. 256-259.

8. Reference material, previously given by Arruga in another critical analysis on Pizzi’s theatre

productions between 1960-1980, is further developed by the author in the quoted “Pier Luigi Pizzi.

Inventore di teatro”, p. 122.

9. The note made by Cristiano Veroli in his paper held on 30 July with as its theme the two productions of

Turandot billed this year in Macerata, underlines Fauvist colourings in the fragmented vocalizing in

Puccini’s Turandot that are close to the painted art form. An observation which is highly relevant if one

thinks of the Fauvist colours, between Symbolism and Déco, of Galileo Chini. Chini’s interest in a fabulous

Orient increased following his travels in Siam, which influenced his entire artistic output. It was precisely for

this reason that Puccini chose him to design the La Scala production, which Chini’s untimely death

prevented him from seeing, of his Turandot

staged in 1926.

© The Scenographer. 2017