There is a family from New York sitting on the aisle. Their son has just graduated and this is their celebration. A man has come from Parma, southeast of Milan, and the short journey is no less momentous for him. We spot an empty seat and wonder why. An illness? An emergency? Who doesn’t pitch for a night at La Scala?
Otherwise, the 2,000-seat opera house is packed to the rafters. Cast your eyes up the six tiers of boxes, and they are teeming with people. The wall of crimson velvet and gold leaf is broken by excited faces and camera flashes. They’re waiting for the house lights to dim and the orchestra to strike a note.
Just three hours earlier, we — a handful of overstimulated Saffas — stood on the stage and looked out at the gargantuan Bohemian crystal chandelier hanging over the waves of scarlet seats in the horseshoe-shaped opera house. It was, frankly, a shock. To find ourselves in the spots once occupied by Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, looking out over the empty house, dreamlike. It’s a tiny moment in a series of surreal minutes, as the director of that evening’s final performance of Nabucco, Alessandro Talevi, walks us around backstage.
“Ciao, Alessandro!” say stagehands and lighting guys as we walk between the wings. Technically, an opera director’s job is done once the show premieres, and you can tell that the team are pleasantly surprised to see the South African there as they prep for the evening.
The Joburger
We’ve come to see Alessandro — or Lexis, as he’s called by family and friends, including his sister, the FM’s Giulietta Talevi, who’s standing next to me — the first South African opera director to put on a new production commissioned by the hallowed home of opera. There is, as it turns out, an older family echo in the building: Giulia Tess, the Italian mezzo-soprano turned soprano and a cousin of Talevi’s grandmother, who sang at La Scala in the 1920s.
I’d nabbed a cancelled ticket the week before, dropping everything to get to Milan, and find myself looking up at the dome Talevi is pointing out above us. It’s the set piece that represents the ruined Hebrew temple central to the show. As he indicates, from where we stand under it, the cupola is elliptical and 3D, but from the audience later that evening it looks rounded, the ceiling of a building with a beam of light shining through its centre.
“It reminds me of the sun shining into the Voortrekker Monument on December 16,” I say, and Talevi practically levitates off his chair with excitement. “That was exactly my inspiration,” he replies. “I’m so glad you got it.” For though Talevi and his husband, Andrew Holden, are Turin locals who jet around the world and speak fluent Italian, Talevi is at heart a Joburg boy.
The St Stithians and Wits grad, who went on to study piano accompaniment at London’s Royal Academy of Music (where opera got its hooks into him), is now at the top of his game, but he still cites the City of Gold as a major inspiration. An excellent mimic, he peppers his conversations with interjections of “Divine, doll!” and “Howzit, boet” and I love that when we see relief sculptures on a set that reference the god Baal, they look like springboks. In a particular scene chorus members have long dreads that wouldn’t be out of place in Small Street Mall.
No pressure then
La Scala is, of course, not just any opera house. And Nabucco is not just any Verdi opera. The production, which ran under the opera’s original title, Nabucodonosor, was conducted by Riccardo Chailly, with the La Scala orchestra and chorus, a couple of hundred people working the machine each night.
For Verdi, Nabucco was the breakthrough. First performed at La Scala in 1842, it is the work that helped turn the young composer into the figure who would become inseparable from Italian opera itself. Its great chorus, Va, pensiero, sung by the Hebrew slaves longing for their homeland, became bound up with Italian self-determination and unification.
So, no pressure then.
When I catch up with Talevi again, he is on his way to Santa Fe in the US, where he is directing Eugene Onegin. He is in the airport lounge and narrates the story of how the Italian gig came to be.
“To this day, it’s a mystery as to who suggested me in the first place,” he says. “I didn’t ask too many questions and perhaps that’s best.” What he did get was a call from his agent.
“He just said: ‘Look, this is what they’re offering, at La Scala.’ And of course the words struck terror in my heart because La Scala is one thing, but Nabucco, which is a difficult opera, and at La Scala, where it’s the title most associated with that house — I thought I was actually hearing things when I listened to his message.”
Oiling Verdi’s machinery
Talevi is frank about the opera’s brilliance, but also its clunkiness.
“It was early in Verdi’s career and he hadn’t quite worked out how to make things flow,” he says. “There are these dramatic moments where the dramaturgy either comes screeching to a halt or suddenly changes direction. It’s not a perfectly woven fabric, and directors can easily fall into the trap of letting it get the better of them.”
His job, as he saw it, was to oil the difficult machinery. “I think I did,” he says. “Because no-one complained about being bored,” he adds with a laugh.
I can attest to that. It fizzed with action. There were chariots, fire, a tower that appeared like a corkscrew out of the ground, and a high-wire act. The production has a circus-like charge, which, it turns out, was not accidental.
“I wanted to respond to the in-your-face quality of the piece,” Talevi says. “And not forget that Nabucco’s librettist, Temistocle Solera, came from a circus background.” A librettist is the person who writes the text of an opera — the words the composer sets to music. “He ran away with a circus troupe when he was a teenager. So that element of razzmatazz, of creating big effects, was in his nature.”
This makes perfect sense once I know it. The opera’s political and biblical thread is there, but so is the theatrical thrill. As Talevi explains to me, Verdi, still young and not yet the architect of perfect operatic inevitability, threw everything at the wall.
“When he wrote it, he had nothing to lose,” he says. “There’s the story that he rejected the libretto and threw it into the corner, and the page fell open on the chorus of the Hebrew slaves. He read those words and it was like some sort of inspiration came to him. Slowly, slowly, the whole opera formed around that.
“A whole legend has been created around it as the choral piece that symbolises the drive for Italian self-determination,” says Talevi. “It embodied the spirit of Italy at the time.”
These threads combined created a couple of expectations. Everyone knows what Nabucco means, or thinks they do. Everyone in Milan, especially, has an opinion. Still, Talevi says, perspective is useful. “At the end of the day, this is just theatre. I’m not a surgeon. I’m not about to perform the Whipple procedure. If it fails, OK, so be it.”
Only, praise be, it didn’t fail — and all reports indicate the production was a success. As an opera newbie, I loved it. Its three hours were gripping. The evening was electric.
“I feel like the fact that we emerged unscathed, let alone having a success, was overwhelming,” Talevi says with an exhale.
Poster family
There is something decidedly South African about this too: the relief and the refusal to be too solemn about it. Likewise, the familiar provenance makes the story even more charming: Giulia Tess, invited by Toscanini to sing at La Scala in 1922. Talevi points her name out on the posters that line the backstage corridors. The poster from his production of Nabucodonosor has just been added to the series.
Will we see onse Alessandro’s name up on more of these opera house placards? I’d put my money on it, boet.