Pier Luigi Pizzi

Pier Luigi Pizzi's career is divided into two paths: he was first engaged as set and costume designer and then, from the late seventies also as director and the sole creator of his productions. His first December 7, 1962, is Il trovatore conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni, but Pizzi alla Scala has already made his debut curating sets and costumes for Il signor Bruschino and the ballet Le donne di buon umore.

After Il trovatore, at La Scala Pizzi staged another seven shows with the director Giorgio De Lullo, founder of the Compagnia dei Giovani with whom Pizzi had long established an artistic association. In 1964 he set Rossini's La Cenerentola in the large atrium of a Neapolitan palace, from which you can see the sea in the background, beyond the arches.

In Strawinskys Oedipus Rex, presented together with Sophocles' Oedipus with new music by Andrea Gabrieli and conducted by Claudio Abbado, a mummified choir looms on the steps of an amphitheatre. Oedipus, whose reflecting armur radiates light, and Jocasta, enclosed in a shell set with red and purple eggs that has become famous, were standing on two high pedestals.

For the "Risorgimento" staging of the Sicilian Vespers that opened the season in 1970 Pizzi decided, together with Gavazzeni and De Lullo, to move the action from the Middle Ages to the time when Verdi composed the opera, a new practice that became very common later.

Pizzi's last opera with De Lullo at La Scala was Aida, conducted by Abbado in 1972. The performance surprised an audience accustomed to Franco Zeffirelli's sumptuous 1963 production. For the first time there is an intimate and sober Aida, with the decorative apparatus reduced to a minimum and the gloomy atmosphere of a psychological drama.

In 1976 Pizzi set Così fan tutte in the warm Neapolitan atmosphere: cloths laid out on the vast terrace and a dome rising over a wall. The direction is by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, who as a playwright wrote several comedies for the Compagnia dei Giovani.

To the ten-year association between Pier Luigi Pizzi and Luca Ronconi we owe some productions who are now part of the history of the theatre, also for the scandals they caused. This is the case of Die Walküre, presented at La Scala in 1974 with a brawl on the evening of the premiere. For the first time the Ring is tackled in a bourgeois key, paving the way for a new way of interpreting Wagner.

The following year, with Siegfried, tensions and controversy escalated, so much so that conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch withdrew from the project, which was suspended before the last day. The entire Tetralogy will then be set up and completed at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

On the occasion of the reopening of La Scala in 2004 after the renovation works, Riccardo Muti wants to rebuild the team that had accompanied him in some great successes of his Florentine years. Thus Pizzi and Ronconi found themselves working together for the last time for Europa riconosciuta by Antonio Salieri.

The privileged relationship between Pizzi and the Baroque theatre emerges from his first attempts as a director. In 1981, in the small space of the Piccola Scala, he set Händel's Ariodante inside a column that rotates on itself and which, opening up, magically reveals another rotating column, gradually generating new images.

In 1985 Pizzi staged Rinaldo in Reggio Emilia, a production that marked a new reference for the Händelian opera, in which the baroque scenic machine was humanized and displayed. The characters are transported on stage by trolleys driven by mimes. After having toured Europe, the show also reached La Scala, in the Teatro degli Arcimboldi in 2005.

The production that probably best synthesizes the baroque universe and Pizzi's figurative invention is Gluck’s Armide, which opened the 2007 season conducted by Muti and was awarded as best show of the year by the association of music critics.

The staging of Gluck's most classic titles deserves a separate mention: in 1987 Alceste finds a neoclassical architectural setting, Muti conducting, after the post-cubist version of 1972 conducted by Gavazzeni.

The Rossini Opera Festival founded in 1980 already in the second year he invited Pizzi, starting a relationship that never ended and that contributed in a significant way to the Rossini renaissance, for the rediscovery of forgotten or critical edition works. Two among the many productions have been filmed at La Scala: Le Comte Ory and Muhammad II.

In 1983 Pizzi came back as director of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, after having already tackled this opera at La Scala as set designer with De Lullo on December 7, 1967, Abbado conducting. Pizzi asked Rosita and Ottavio Missoni for the costume in order to reinvent Lucia's Scottish world.

At La Scala Pizzi directed another Donizetti opera in 2008: Maria Stuarda was a co-production with the Sferisterio di Macerata, a festival of which Pizzi was the artistic director at the time.

Pizzi made his directorial debut at La Scala with two early operas by Verdi, both conducted by Riccardo Chailly, not yet thirty years old. In the Masnadieri production in 1978 the set highlights an essential romanticism both in the open air scenes and in the interiors, where you can see a quotation from Caspar David Friedrich's window.

The following year, with I due Foscari, Pizzi investigates one of Verdi's themes par excellence: the conflict between the cruel cynicism of power and the powerless and torn love of a father.

Pizzi reinvents I Vespri siciliani, this time as a director, for the season opening in 1989, under the baton of Muti. The patriotic climate of the Risorgimento remains in a melancholic Sicily: an island open to the sea and intolerant of oppression.

It would be unfair to forget Pizzi's successes in the comic repertoire. One of his most beloved productions at La Scala, originally produced by the theatre of Reggio Emilia, is Nino Rota's Il cappello di paglia di Firenze, which the director closes with the screening of a film of the wedding between the protagonists, who thus become spectators of their happy ending.