Download Emanuele Luzzati - The scenographer

Emanuele Luzzati at Spoleto, and beyond
by Ivana D’Agostino
Emanuele Luzzati (1921 – 2007)
The exhibition entitled “Rossini e Mozart nell’opera di Luzzati”, which took place at Spoleto as part of the
initiatives promoted by the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of Two Worlds), offered ample documentation
on Luzzati’s projects for opera productions.
In addition to significant stage designs for Rossini and Mozart operas, at Spoleto concept sketches and
working sketches for animated films produced and written by Luzzati with Gianini for The Thieving Magpie,
L’italiana in Algeri, Pulcinella and The Magic Flute were on display. At the distance of two years, now
seems a good occasion to take stock and acknowledge Luzzati’s multiple artistic talents, whose heart has
always remained with the theatre. One could affirm, with the photo that Emanuele Luzzati shows us,
picturing him at the age of twelve while he demonstrates the little puppet theatre he has constructed to a pair
of female friends, and as he himself remarked (1) on an early initiation into the world of theatre at the age of
seven or so with The Barber of Seville at the Teatro Pagannini in Genoa, that these are to be considered
premonitory signs of his express desire to work in theatre. In sixty years of activity he has developed his allround skills to the full. The nascent desire to be a theatre painter, already blossoming during his early youth
spent in Genoa with Fersen and Trionfo – later meeting up with them again in the early 1940s in Lausanne
due to the supervening racial laws – took shape in this Swiss city where he attended the Ecole des Beaux
Arts et des Arts Appliquées, finding the natural deterrent in which to broaden his studies in graphics and
illustration. Luzzati’s art intended as craft, an open workshop constantly in movement, where the boundaries
between expressive languages unceasingly merge, ideally follows the lineage founded by early twentiethcentury artists such as Fortuny, Cambellotti, Balla, Depero, Thayaht – to cite a few significant examples –
has always borne out the principle of a total art of Wagner-like Painting is the exception, for which he
himself declares to have little interest, and maintaining the centrality of theatre as foundation and linchpin,
Luzzati’s activities reveal a continuous osmotic process in the play of cross-references and circularity of the
comparable correspondence between his stage designs and his costumes, and his designs for ceramics,
tapestries, furniture for ships, tarot cards, greetings cards, shadow theatre, cartoons, through to the urban
exterior design project in 1998 for the park in Santa Margherita Ligure dedicated to The Magic Flute, and the
prized heraldic banner for the Palio of Siena for this year in which, seized at the Mangia Tower of the
Palazzo Pubblico we find the Pulcinella, the same motif that in 1973 inspired the animated cartoon of the
same name produced in association with Giulio Gianini.
The Spoleto exhibition inaugurated two years ago, dedicated to “Rossini e Mozart nell’opera di Luzzati”, is
used here as a pretext to digress on the artist’s long career, to include Pulcinella in the trilogy of Rossinithemed animated films by way of the musical score composed on the basis of the overture from Il turco in
Italia. Luzzati’s expressed interest for musical performance naturally spurs him to identify in the music the
coordinating element between the narrative development of the animated cartoons and the action of the
characters according to a method of extraordinary aesthetic beauty and intense poetic quality, achieved both
in Pulcinella and the earlier The Thieving Magpie of 1964 and L’italiana in Algeri of 1968. Though Fellini,
in a letter, considered Pulcinella even finer than The Thieving Magpie because he felt that it belonged to the
world of poetry. Luzzati’s universe revealed through working designs and concept sketches for these
animated films demonstrates a constant process of simplification and reduction to the point of eliminating
from the characters and images every possible naturalistic reference, seeing them rather as brightly coloured
simplified figures often obtained by the superimposition of a variety of cut-out printed cards to form a
collage. The simple, flattened, two-dimensional spaces suggest his own solutions for graphic design and
illustration – which, as we know, the artist has developed since the days of his study period in Lausanne –
the editorial projects for children’s books – from the Mursia to the Emme editions and to the more recent
collaborations with the Milan-based Nuages Edizioni – work opportunities that have intensified following a
period of success, the Oscar nominations for The Thieving Magpie and Pulcinella animated films in
association with his long-time working partner, Gianini. Among the Rossini productions, the 1992 staging of
Semiramide, as it is a tragic melodrama, is stripped of all those playful, fable elements usually attributed to
the staging of an opera buffa through a chromatic splendour usually so characteristic of Luzzati. In
Semiramide the solemnity of the narrated events is related by Babylonian architectural elements that are
rigorously reduced to black and white prints that, for the sheer monumentality of the sets designed to rouse
and transmit a moral significance, communicate the utopian projects by architects such as Boulée, at the time
of the French Revolution. The fairy-tale aspect typified by a certain puppet-like rigidity – ideally traced back
to the puppet shows that a young Luzzati staged for his sister – as well as being present in all the graphic art
and animated cartoons that he has produced, is also consistently expressed in other Rossini productions and
throughout the entire gamut of design projects staged for opera, the origins of which lay in the 1963 project
for Glyndebourne, where, together with Enriquez, he designed the sets for Mozart’s Magic Flute.
The pleasure of the hand-crafted, of the workshop, of the creative act realized through a direct rapport with
the chosen material, first established in the late 1950s with Trionfo and the Borsa di Arlecchino in Genoa,
continuing on from 1976 at the eventful Teatro della Tosse with Tonino Conte, continues to re-emerge, being
an intrinsic part of this Genoese artist’s nature, in his stage designs for major theatres, many of which
executed from the 1990s onwards.
For the 1992 production of The Barber of Seville staged at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, directed by E.
Marcucci, his use of chromatic transparencies and collages of ceramic motifs printed in a style between the
Moresque and the florid, not only suggests historical Sevillian majolicaware, but also calls to mind the
artist’s own production of ceramics, which began in the 1950s at the kiln in Pozzo della Garitta, Albisola.
The allusions to the transparency of ceramic glaze implemented in the stage designs and to a certain graphic
taste that logically lends itself to the two-dimensional, guide the stage designs towards a planning of space,
the depth of which is chiefly acquired by parallel planes.
His stage designs for the 1984 production of L’italiana in Algeri staged at La Fenice in Venice, directed by
Roberto De Simone, and revived with the opera’s new 1999 staging at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo,
directed by Maurizio Scaparro, both reflect a similar working of space. In accordance with what Luzzati
himself says about “doing a Turco or an Italiana just using coloured curtains, objects that come and go with
no reference whatsoever to the period”, the stage design for the 1999 production of L’italiana in Algeri, with
miniature models created by Roberto Rebaudengo, is in fact pared down to the minimal in the pictorial wings
and little backdrop, where the scene changes are effected by partition screens decorated with Islamic
abstract-geometrical motifs, the movement of which is exclusively organised along parallel lines in order to
allude to spatial depth. If, in the play of stylistic references, the borders of this opera are also decorated like
the motifs on the partition screens, which for their evocative power of secret environments such as that of the
harem, an early application of screens decorated with Moresque motifs is also found in Mozart’s Il ratto dal
seraglio, also on display at Spoleto, and staged at Glyndebourne in 1968, directed by Enriquez.
Mention must also be made of the splendid costumes for L’Italiana in Algeri, so evocative of a fabulous,
magical Orient, and although built at the Farani costume house in Rome, the techniques used, the print on the
cloth and the patchwork all recall Luzzati’s much earlier practises.
La cantata dei pastori, directed by Peppe Barra
The curtain realized for the 1945 staging of Salomone e la regina di Saba by Fersen was a patchwork, as
were the costumes for The Taming of the Shrew by Enriquez in 1962, which were built on-site at the Roman
amphitheatre in Verona, by sewing together directly onto the actors different types of fabric, which were
then painted with the decorative motifs. But, if in those years the retrieval and recycling of materials then
contextualized in a different manner were aligned to the ideas of a certain type of avant-garde theatre that
utilized poor materials – in this way Pop Art inherited it from Dadaism, just as the collages originated
directly from the avant-garde at the turn of the last century – today, the memory of those practices that have
reemerged here and there, together with the re-emergence of painted backdrops, ceramics and the marvellous
accrochages, give tangible measure to an exquisite style that belongs to Luzzati, capable of mixing a variety
of elements. It is in theatre that his manifold artistic experiences converge, placing the workshop and
craftsmanship on the same plane as planning and the idea – as he has always sustained with his students at
theschool of stage design he founded in 1992-93 the Teatro della Tosse. In coherence with these principles,
the scale model for the 1983 staging of Il turco in Italia, directed by E. Marcucci, for the Rossini Opera
Festival, on display at Spoleto, shows a delightful proscenium decorated with upper-tier boxes housing
grouped figures leaning over as far as the decorative drapes: an example of theatre within theatre, taken from
two of Luzzati’s illustrations for “Cenerentola” published in 1979 by the Milanese Emme editions.
Continuing on the theme of Rossini stage designs, the 1985 production of Armida, also directed by E.
Marcucci, for the Fenice in Venice, by Andrea Rauch, is regarded as one of his most visually beautiful stage
designs; a skilful mélange of images from d’Epinal, nineteenth-century bestiary (2) and, I would like to add,
the Sacri Boschi (Sacred Woods) of Bomarzo, the park housing mythical monsters and other wonders, so
adapted to representing Tasso’s epic poem. But it is with the 1963 staging of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at
the Glyndebourne Festival that fully revealed to Luzzati the intrinsic rhythm of his own form of narration in
opera stagings. And it is from here, it is this stage design rather than the previous isolated case of the 1952
production of La diavolessa by Galuppi for La Fenice in Venice, that stimulates his systematic interest which
has never flagged for this kind of theatre, and which was so widely documented at Spoleto, not least through
the Rossini operas so far examined.
L’elisir d’amore, by Gaetano Donizetti directed by Filippo Crivelli
The model of the flute, the large forms of Papageno and Papagena, the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, as
well as the sketches and working drawings of the animated film inspired by the opera, and just as enchanting,
clearly demonstrate Luzzati’s predilection for Mozart’s masterpiece. For The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne,
produced on site, the artist reutilized painted scenery elements, incorporating them onto the face of mobile
screens,suggestive of a wood, Sarastro’s temple, the abode of the Queen of the Night. The delightfully fairytale aspect of this stage design reappears in the more recent staging of Luzzati’s The Magic Flute in 2002, at
the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, directed by Daniela Abbado. Here, too, the stage design makes use of
backdrops and pictorial wings to define an otherwise empty space encompassing the centre-stage dominated
by the abode of the Queen of the Night, doused in the usual cool colours. By contrast, Sarastro, surrounded
byradiant colours, appears from the cutaway of an armillary sphere, an ancient astronomical instrument used
to study the heavens, here reconverted to represent the sacredness of the temple. Based on the Glyndebourne
production, the 1971 English publication of the children’s book “The Magic Flute from the Opera of W.A.
Mozart” was the springboard from which to create and produce, in 1978, the animated cartoon of Mozart’s
opera, result of the well-established collaboration between Luzzati and Gianini. At Spoleto, the sketches
produced for the splendid animated film on The Magic Flute, displayed as a storyboard on the walls of the
Palazzo Arroni, shows us the enchanted wonder of animals reinterpreted between Chagall and Rousseau as
they appear from luxuriant forests to the call of Tamino’s flute. In the image created from a collage of
coloured paper and various types of fabric - alchemic fusions stemming from Luzzati’s characteristic
workshopstyle technique of utility and transformation - Sarastro’s priests, positioned in formations of sharp
verticality, wear Oriental-style garments that echo the priestly attire of Sarastro. The same technique that was
employed when drawing on his ceramic works produced many years previously at Albisola to create the
majolica designs for the 1969 production of Così fan tutte directed by Enriquez and staged at the Bayerische
Staatsoper in Munich. Majolica again, for its transparency of colours and reference to Castelli’s
craftsmanship in the cloister of the church of Santa Chiara in Naples, reappears among the inspired motifs of
the new stage design for Così fan tutte in 2002, staged at the Teatro da Ponte di Vittorio Veneto and directed
by Scaparro. Here, the presence of a puppet theatre seems to serve to remind us that Luzzati’s long artistic
career indeed began with his homemade sets for puppet shows staged for his sister and her friends. Further
inspiration is drawn from forms of popular theatre for the staging of The Shepherds’ Cantata in 2003 for the
Teatro Trianon in Naples, directed by De Simone. The sacred seventeenth-century representation by
Casimiro Ruggero, originally conceived as a Christmas play for the Neopolitan public is not, obviously,
included among the Spoleto exhibits dedicated to Rossini and Mozart. However, as this is about musical
performance and is clearly characterized by a intentionally naïve imprint suited to its destined audience, it
does not seem inappropriate to take it into consideration, particularly as it regards one of Luzzati’s latest
stage designs, on another collaboration with the director De Simone, with whom he first worked in 1984 for
the staging of L’italiana in Algeri, the latter on exhibit at Spoleto. The wonderful sets for the Apparition,
featuring a riot of Baroque clouds, and the Nativity, with detailed backdrop and starry sky so like that of
domestic nativity scenes, appropriate for their undoubted didactic significance in The Shepherds’ Cantata,
continueto surprise us through the inexhaustible poetic force of the artist’s imagination. This same force
remains intact in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. On the Festival’s inaugural evening, the musical
transfiguration of the visual sensations experienced by Mussorgsky at an exhibition of paintings by his friend
Hartmann take shape in Luzzati’s visions of the Cart, the Castle and the Gate of Kiev projected onto the
façade and bell tower of the cathedral of Spoleto, accompanied by the figures of acrobatic dancers by Valerio
Festi, while from the Palazzo Arroni large cut-outs of Emanuele Luzzati’s characters lean out of its windows
in order to join us in watching a spectacle of incomparable beauty.
Notes
1. Dipingere il teatro,(edited by R. Cirio), Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2000, pge. 7
2. AA.VV., Emanuele Luzzati Scénografe, (exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou), Paris, 1993, from pge. 39.
©The Scenographer 2006