Everything had however started well, between Verdi and La Scala.
At the end of the 1830s, the theater inaugurated in 1778 was at a crossroads.
Returning to Habsburg after the Napoleonic parenthesis, the very aristocratic temple of lyrical art lost its three headliners: Bellini is dead, Rossini has retired and Donizetti is trying his luck in Paris.
Superintendent Bartolomeo Merelli, impresario as was the custom at the time, had to find something new.
The public wants creation, not repertoire.
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It was then that he received the manuscript from an unknown 25-year-old, Giuseppe Verdi.
He had the libretto revised but kept the music.
Oberto
was created on November 17, 1839 and enjoyed a very estimable success for a newcomer: thirty-one performances.
Absolute contrast with the following:
A day of reign
is an oven, all the more painful since the composer has just lost his wife.
Merelli convinces him to get back to work to drown his sorrows.
It will be
Nabucco
, March 9, 1842, not only an accomplished masterpiece but rallying cry of the Risorgimento.
La Scala has just launched Verdi's great career as an opera composer and political symbol.
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The Lombards
(1843) prolongs this patriotic vein, but there is water in the gas.
Lured by these successes, other theaters turned their eyes to Verdi, such as La Fenice in Venice which created
Ernani
in 1844. La Scala did have the exclusive rights to
Giovanna d'Arco
the following year, but relations deteriorated : Verdi criticizes Merelli for behaving like an impresario, relying solely on singing stars to the detriment of musical and scenic preparation.
The casus belli comes when Verdi learns that Merelli negotiated the sale of
Giovanna d'Arco
with the publisher Ricordi and programmed
Ernani
without asking permission.
This is too much: he swears that La Scala will no longer have the creation of a single one of his operas.
He will keep his word for… forty-two years!
Venice, Rome, Naples, London, Paris, Trieste, Saint Petersburg and Cairo will share the scoop of Verdian triumphs and failures for the next four decades.
The glory of La Scala
Time ends up doing its pacifying office, even for the most stubborn.
The meeting with Arrigo Boito will be decisive for the big comeback.
In 1880, when Verdi had not composed an opera for ten years, Boito became his librettist and convinced him to return to composition by measuring himself against his old accomplice Shakespeare: Milan created his ultimate masterpieces,
Otello
in 1887 and
Falstaff
in 1893.
From then on, La Scala became the center of Verdian interpretation.
At the creation of
Otello
, the cello section of the orchestra counts among its members a young tailor's son born twenty years earlier in Parma and who is passionate about conducting: Arturo Toscanini.
He takes the opportunity to get closer to the old master.
After having proven himself as a musical director in Turin, he was appointed in 1898 to the same position at La Scala, thanks to the support of Verdi and Boito.
He is 31 years old.
With administrator Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Toscanini reformed the theater, the price to be paid for his intransigence being a dramatic improvement in quality.
He reinvented Verdi by ridding him of bad traditions, notably refusing encores (while prohibiting ladies' hats in the room…) He left La Scala for the first time in 1903 when he was refused a raise, to return from 1906 to 1908,
but when Gatti-Casazza was appointed to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Toscanini did not hesitate to follow him.
From 1920 to 1929, he was again at the head of La Scala for a final Milanese period, just as glorious, which would only end when his opposition to Mussolini's fascism had made his position untenable.
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La Scala's tour of Berlin and Vienna in 1929 was a revelation for many: Germany discovered an unprecedented perfection of execution, to the point that Alfred Einstein evoked
"a dangerous example, by the yardstick of which we are now going to measure the 'German art'.
It is the young Karajan who is marked in the most indelible way:
"I understood then that there is no vulgar music when you do not put vulgarity in the interpretation."
When Toscanini left, it was Victor de Sabata who appeared as the obvious successor, the immense choirmaster Vittore Veneziani ensuring continuity at the head of the country's most renowned choral forces.
De Sabata immediately leaves the direction, getting angry with the orchestra, but Toscanini writes to him to convince him to reconsider his decision.
He follows the advice and stays for twenty years, but cuts off contact with Toscanini, Sabata's proximity to Mussolini probably having something to do with this estrangement.
After the war, his career took an international turn but his home remained La Scala.
Cardiac, he entrusts more and more responsibilities to his assistant Carlo Maria Giulini, who becomes chief chef.
De Sabata takes over the baton to record the
Requiem
of Verdi in 1954, the year of his reconciliation with Toscanini.
When the latter died in 1957, he conducted the same
Requiem
at La Scala.
De Sabata was inspired by the legendary accuracy of Toscanini, but with more extroversion, to the point that Toscanini found his style too exterior.
At the pulpit, he exuded an intense fascination:
"A cross between Julius Caesar and Satan"
, one orchestral musician had called him.
two rivals
The brief tenure of his successor Giulini was marked by
La Traviata
in 1955, directed by Visconti with La Callas.
A culmination where for the first time you get the impression that an opera performance is a whole: conducting, staging, sets, costumes, singing and acting are one.
Soon, however, Giulini walks away from opera.
Its excessively high demands do not accommodate the concessions that have to be made.
At the beginning of the 1960s, without having the title, Herbert von Karajan was a kind of unofficial musical director who drew the quintessence of a
Requiem
by Verdi immortalized by Clouzot's cameras, the choirs being then prepared by Roberto Benaglio, the coach. Giulini's favorite.
After the interims of Giulini and Karajan, La Scala will only find a lasting musical director with Claudio Abbado.
In his thirties, the Milanese's patience paid off: in 1965, he made his debut at the Salzburg Festival and… at La Scala.
The Temple of Lyrical Art appointed him principal conductor in 1969 and artistic director in 1971, for fifteen years which will remain in the memory.
Refusing the routine, he takes care of his productions: scores conforming to the original, high-flying casts, particular attention to the theatrical dimension, as evidenced by his complicity with directors of genius like Giorgio Strehler, all of this culminates in a
Simon Boccanegra
and a
Macbeth
where Verdi takes on a modern face, with the complicity of an inspired choirmaster, Romano Gandolfi.
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After Abbado comes Muti, whom the press likes to oppose to him: leaving a career dominated by the symphonic, Riccardo Muti returns to the lyric by the front door, in 1986. A priesthood which makes him a distant successor of his model Toscanini.
After Abbado's modernist vision, he wants to reconnect with the Italian roots of theatre.
He reigns as a "maestro assoluto", applying his work on the text to Verdi.
Even if it means offending lyrical aficionados, to whom he refuses organ points and high Cs not provided for in the score!
Become philharmonic under Abbado, the orchestra improves its level in a spectacular way, and Muti likes to spend hours to make pronounce each syllable with the choristers.
But if his musical achievements are exemplary,
it doesn't always show a happy hand in casts and the choice of directors.
On the other hand, he covered himself with glory when, one day when the orchestra was on strike, he saved the performance of
La Traviata
accompanying it himself… on the piano!
His reign came to an abrupt end in 2005: in disagreement with Superintendent Carlo Fontana, the chef obtained his dismissal, but the staff refused the successor imposed by Muti and the conflict escalated until the vote of a motion of no confidence.
Thunderbolt in Italy.
“Maestro scaligero”
In 2006, Daniel Barenboim accepted the title of “maestro scaligero” created for him by Stéphane Lissner at La Scala.
And who will remain for his Wagnerian accomplishments more than Verdian, which should not make us forget an
intensely dark
Requiem .
Since 2017, for the first time since Abbado, it is a Milanese who presides over the musical destinies of La Scala in the person of Riccardo Chailly.
A conductor as comfortable in symphony as in opera, as familiar with Italian style as with Germanic aesthetics.
With him comes above all a Verdian maestro who does not feel bound by a tradition of interpretation, but returns tirelessly to the score.
Intellectual rigor coupled with an energy that made him one of the great batons of the time whose interpretation of the
Requiem
, given by Chailly at Milan Cathedral in 2020, in tribute to the victims of the pandemic.
PRACTICE
www.choregies.fr
04 90 34 24 24
billetterie@choregies.com
Ticket office: 18, place Sylvain in Orange, open Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Closed Friday afternoon.
And from June 20, 2022, Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. (and until 9:15 p.m. on performance days).
AT THE ANCIENT THEATER
June 20 - Music festivities, live from the Chorégies.
July 7 - Chung/Aimard concert at 9.30 p.m. (seats from €45 to €135).
July 8 - “L'elisir d'amore” by Donizetti at 9.30 p.m. (seats from €50 to €290).
July 14 - “Missa solemnis” by Beethoven at 9.30 p.m. (seats from €45 to €135).
July 18 - “Giselle” by the Ballet du Capitole de Toulouse at 9.30 p.m. (seats from €35 to €100).
July 20 - Italian Night with La Scala in Milan at 9.30 p.m. (seats from €70 to €220).
July 30 - Cine-concert "City Lights", by Charlie Chaplin at 9.30 p.m. (seat: €30)
August 2 - The Chorégies welcome the Ukrainian Freedom Tour, musical direction Keri-Lynn Wilson, soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, piano Anna Fedorova.
At 9:30 p.m. (free show).
August 5 - “The New World Symphony” by Dvořák, at 9.30 p.m. (seats from €45 to €135).
August 6 - “La Gioconda” by Ponchielli, at 9.30 p.m. (seats from €50 to €290).
AT THE PRINCES' PALACE
July 16 - Emerging scene, recital at 9 p.m. (seat: €35).