Zeffirelli: still the Maestro of excess
Robin Lee Navrozov talks to the 83-year-old director about his operatic productions, his anxiety about his forthcoming memoirs, and the similarity between Callas and Thatcher The opening of the season at La Scala in Milan on 7 December is always a grand affair, and this year will be no exception. Franco Zeffirelli, 83 years old, is directing a new production of Aida, a work that has not been staged at this theatre for more than 20 years.
It is noon when I arrive at La Scala to interview Zeffirelli, but inside the magnificent domed hall it seems like evening, and preparations are well under way for the big night. Round lights glow softly in the dainty red plush and gold-trimmed boxes, stacked like Christmas presents to a dizzying height. The splendid red velvet stage curtains are open. There is a gold platform with scarabs and Egyptian cobra motifs. A man attached to a cord flies through the air overhead.
At the centre of all the pomp and magnificence, fittingly, is Franco Zeffirelli, directing. La Scala has a permanent staff of about 800, so there is no shortage of technicians and carpenters, porters, stagehands and seamstresses, and other various indigenous types bustling about the set seeing to their business. The Maestro is flanked by his assistants, on whom he leans for support when he needs to walk. His health has been failing, and he is not strong. Pippo and Luciano, his two lifelong companions, are never far from his side. They adore him and are fiercely protective. ‘Who is calling him on that number?’ snaps Pippo when Franco picks up a call on his portable phone. The Maestro is not to be pestered. Yet, overall, the atmosphere at the rehearsal is benevolent. ‘You’ve grown,’ Zeffirelli remarks to a lanky workman in overalls who climbs down from a ladder where he has been hammering on the set. The carpenter, in his mid-fifties, beams with appreciation, like a young Bill Clinton being singled out of the crowd by JFK.
Franco Zeffirelli represents an era. He is a legend, a tangible link to that ineffable, incomparable glamour which seems sometimes only a memory in the distant past. As he himself admits, ‘This kind of magnificent Aida that I am doing now is the kind of thing that could have been done 30 years ago. But the costs are now prohibitive. It is ruinous. It does not make sense.’ It is a remarkable fact that Italy supports 12 fullscale opera houses. Apart from La Scala there is Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice, Naples, Genoa, Turin, Trieste, Verona, Cagliari and Palermo. Then there are the smaller theatres that may not put on a complete season but still get some funding, such as Bergamo, Cremona, Piacenza, Mantua, Treviso, Parma, Modena, Ferrara, Lucca, Livorno and Catania. Then there are the festivals. Spoleto, Taormina, Pesaro.... And still they somehow find a way to put 400 cast members on stage for the triumphal procession in the most lavish opera by the most lavish director in the most lavish theatre in existence.
‘It is a tragedy,’ says Zeffirelli. ‘Really Italy should have no more than three or four theatres supported by the state. There needs to be a big reformation, with state funding cut, and the ability for sponsors to be able to deduct from their taxes. But the government in Italy will never do that. Everything is corruption here.’ Yet there is unquestionably an upside to this state munificence: it is this current regime, which hardly questions expense or its own raison d’être, that makes the phenomenon of Franco Zeffirelli a possibility, indeed a reality. ‘The system we have in place goes back to the time of Mussolini. The Fascists considered opera to be the highest expression of our cultural tradition and they invented these huge structures to protect it. Perhaps it was the only good thing they did.’ That is what started the whole modern concept of opera as something grand and important, and the consensus that it should be kept alive by state subsidy on a massive scale.
‘The provinces and regions should finance their own theatres. I don’t see why the worker from northern Italy should pay for the opera house in Sicily!’ Actually Italy is subsidising opera for the whole world. Without those Italian theatres, without their glorious dimensions and incomparable prestige, the non-stop débuts and opportunities they give to all the young singers, directors, conductors and the rest, not to mention the grand venues and regular employment for all the big stars, opera would simply not exist in anything like its present form.
In April Zeffirelli’s new production of La Traviata starring the world-famous diva Angela Gheorghiu will open in Rome. Mauro Trombetta, artistic director of the Rome Opera, is adamant that Franco Zeffirelli is worth every penny of the two million euro production cost. ‘He is a genius and he is unique.’ Gheorghiu agrees. ‘Franco Zeffirelli is a great artist. He has the culture, he knows the music and he visualises the score at the highest level. He is the standard by which all the others are judged. But that does not mean that we do not move on. If it is not something new, I do not do it.’ This month Mondadori publishes Franco Zeffirelli’s autobiography. ‘I cannot tell you how nerve-wracking it is,’ he confides during the rehearsal break we spend chatting in his dressing-room. ‘It is a trip through heaven and hell to present my life accurately, not tell lies, not leave anything important out, and to be honest even when recounting my own unpleasant behaviour!’ He fixes me with those heavenly blue eyes. He is really a beautiful man even at 83. ‘This is a very serious book. It is not about my sexual life!’ ‘My relation with Callas was a love more violent and deep than the love between two lovers,’ he continues.
‘Was she the most fabulous woman you have ever known?’ ‘I consider her one of the greatest four women of the century.’ ‘Who are the other three?’ I ask, trying not to sound jealous on her behalf.
‘Mother Teresa, Chanel and Mrs Thatcher.’ Franco Zeffirelli is not on the cutting edge. The concept of ‘less is more’ has evidently never occurred to him. His style, onstage and off, is voluptuous, extravagant, sumptuous, theatrical. He is a product as much as a creator of Italian lyric theatre. In opera, unlike film, the story, the words and the music are what they are, and the director is only in charge of how it all looks. Charming, gallant, unpretentious and entertaining to those who know him even slightly, to those who know him well he is unsurpassably kind and loyal, affectionate and generous. Personally I think Zeffirelli and his productions and all those gazillions of Italian opera houses and operas are fabulous. Some people don’t. They are rats and should make a tasty meal for Gus the Theatre Cat. Evviva il Maestro!
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