Il Turco In ItaliaTeatro Alla Scala
Maria Callas, the tragic singer par excellence, only rarely sung in opera buffa. The occasion came at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome in 1950 when Gianandrea Gavazzeni proposed her to perform an almost completely forgotten opera by Rossini: Il turco in Italia.
Rossini had triumphed at La Scala when he was very young with La pietra del paragone in 1812 and in Venice with Tancredi and L'italiana in Algeri.
Il Turco In ItaliaTeatro Alla Scala
In 1814 La Scala’s impresario Benedetto Ricci had asked him for a new opera seria, Aureliano in Palmira and an opera buffa, Il turco in Italia, for which the young librettist Felice Romani had taken up the subject of an eighteenth-century opera by Caterino Mazzolà. Il turco was accused of being a remake of the Italiana andwas coldly received. After that it went soon out of the repertoire for over a century.
Il Turco In ItaliaTeatro Alla Scala
In the 1950s instead Il turco in Italia had many arguments to convince: it was funny, cynical, written with eighteenth-century verve and the character of the Poet remembered of Pirandello. After the success of the performances in Rome with sets and costumes by Mino Maccari, Gavazzeni made a recording with Callas and the Teatro alla Scala orchestra in the summer of 1954 and a reprise at La Scala the following March with direction, sets and costumes by Franco Zeffirelli.
Il Turco In ItaliaTeatro Alla Scala
Callas, who has just sung La sonnambula with Bernstein and is about to sing La traviata with Giulini, shows the new silhouette she got after a long diet, and is ready to wear funny and imaginative clothes that will make you forget of her status as a great tragedienne.
Turco in Italia, costume by Franco ZeffirelliTeatro Alla Scala
Franco Zeffirelli, little more than thirty years old, offers in Gavazzeni's words "a painting of rare unity and fantasy" with sets that Eugenio Montale describes "halfway between oleographic vedutism and the painting of Pitloo, a very pretty eighteenth-century Naples".
For the first dress Zeffirelli ironically chooses a red damask satin similar to the covering of la Scala’s boxes, and animates it with tassels, fringes and pom-poms.
Il Turco In ItaliaTeatro Alla Scala
Turco in Italia, costume by Franco ZeffirelliTeatro Alla Scala
The second dress also has the cheerful bravado of a monochrome in a primary colour: the skirt at the ankle is made of yellow satin doubled with gold tulle.
Alongside Callas sang Nicola Rossi Lemeni, Cesare Valletti and, in the role of the poet, Mariano Stabile who had been Toscanini's Falstaff. The show is a triumph that is resumed on tour in Edinburgh and then at the Piccola Scala.
But another forty years must pass before Il turco in Italia returns to La Scala, this time in the critical edition curated by Margaret Bent for the Rossini Foundation in Pesaro, thanks to Riccardo Chailly’s passion for Rossini.
