Il Trittico/Wozzeck

La Scala, Milan

For any non-Italian visiting the home of Italian opera, the expectation is that you will have the archetypal Italian operatic experience: rousing choruses, flamboyant singing, ardent expressions of love, revenge and death. And once you have taken in the aura of La Scala, with its red velvet boxes and magnificent central chandelier and sense of tradition (all of which, after nearly 30 years of visits, I still marvel at), you do invariably get a flavour of how the Italians understand their “lyric theatre” – as an integral part of national culture that extends beyond narrow interests and income brackets.

As for what takes place on stage, anyone expecting the archetypal Italian experience should think again. This season alone includes Lorin Maazel’s 1984 (a derivative musicking of George Orwell), Macbeth with a Japanese conductor, a Peter Stein staging of Bartók and a co-production with Berlin of Prokofiev’s The Gambler. Since the departure of Riccardo Muti three years ago the great Milanese theatre has been run by foreigners: the sovrintendente is French, his artistic administrator is from the New World.

La Scala still manages to cast Italian repertoire with a reasonable quotient of Italian singers, in spite of an alarming shrinkage in the reservoir of voices suited to the Verdi/Puccini repertoire – in direct contrast to those native singers now making international careers in baroque opera. And it still attracts Italian conductors of the calibre of Riccardo Chailly and Daniele Gatti, the two most obvious contenders for the vacant post of music director.

But there was nothing typically Italian about its latest productions of Puccini’s Il Trittico and Berg’s Wozzeck. Wozzeck, not exactly noted for bel canto, was treated to a seamless, uncluttered production that impressed above all for the way it profiled the aching lyricism of the music. The orchestra, responding to Gatti’s impassioned command, mastered Berg’s complex score as if it was in the blood. The performance ran without a break – no opportunity for Milan’s fashionistas to parade in the interval – but a packed audience listened intently and applauded enthusiastically, in spite of the absence of star singers.

All this was evidence that Milan has a distinguished, though largely unrecognised, tradition in German opera, nurtured in the postwar era by Furtwängler, Karajan and Sawallisch. If you wanted evidence of the enduring strength of this trans-Alpine attraction of opposites, Wozzeck provided it. In fact, Berg’s opera was performed at La Scala (with Tito Gobbi as Wozzeck) even before it reached Covent Garden in 1952, and Claudio Abbado conducted it there throughout the 1970s.

Jürgen Flimm’s 10-year-old staging, lovingly revived in the designs by Erich Wonder and Florence von Gerkan, is the most visually beautiful I have seen. A simple centrepiece of curved panelling, with a rear horizontal strip of changing colours, cradles every scene, while paradoxically hardening the expressionistic punch of Wozzeck’s downtrodden fate. The only false note was provided by Flimm’s bizarre decision to have the orchestra seated on stage in the inn scene. Georg Nigl was the appealingly young Wozzeck, Evelyn Herlitzius a heart-wrenching Marie, while the veteran Heinz Zednik provided a surprise cameo as the Fool.

The Trittico – a triptych of one-acters that runs from verismo melodrama (Il tabarro) through sentimental tragedy (Suor Angelica) to wicked comedy (Gianni Schicchi) – was, by contrast, stolidly staged, indifferently cast and tepidly received. At Thursday’s first night one of the singers was booed – Italian opera has its less attractive traditions – and it was nearly midnight before the final curtain came down.

Luca Ronconi’s staging makes no attempt at a radical update but has none of the charm of tradition. Il tabarro is tepid and un-atmospheric – Margherita Palli’s realistic Seine barge and Silvia Aymonino’s 1920s costumes don’t help – while Gianni Schicchi unfolds on a sea of crimson brocade, with everyone in mid-20th-century costume except, bizarrely, the rogue title character, dressed like a medieval Punch. At least La Scala had invested in three separate sets – it is false economy to dress this triptych in the same clothes – and Suor Angelica is easily the most eye-catching. A monumental statue of the Madonna lies prostrate across the stage, an apt symbol of sacrificial motherhood and the judgmental power of the Church, the two dominant themes of a work set in a convent.

Ronconi bathes the opera in unrelenting light, as if to starve it of sentiment, and the ending, in which Angelica commits suicide and is symbolically reunited with the deceased child she had out of wedlock, has more bathos than pathos. Chailly played a part in this by refusing to indulge the music. He then conducted a needle-sharp account of Schicchi – though overall the first night sounded as if the music still needed some bedding in.

Hearing Puccini at La Scala is always special, but you’re best to go for an opera with rousing choruses and a cast more distinguished than this. Paoletta Marrocu’s Giorgetta, the adulterous wife in Il tabarro, had clearly been chosen more for pouty looks than her modest soprano. Barbara Frittoli’s Angelica suggested that, for all her eloquent musicianship, hers is not a Puccini voice: “Senza Mamma” lacked bloom. The Schicchi was Leo Nucci – an unexpected triumph for a veteran baritone whose voice, always lean of timbre, sounded remarkably robust, an impression doubtless influenced by the old-school quality of his vocal acting. The Michele was the Spaniard Juan Pons, whose stage personality is no more imposing than when I first heard him at La Scala 25 years ago as a young Falstaff in the Strehler production. The other non-Italian principals were Mariana Lipovsek, a suitably chilling Zia Principessa in Angelica, and Nino Machaidze’s pale Lauretta in Schicchi.

It was fascinating to hear Gatti and Chailly on consecutive nights. Gatti conducts more from the heart, Chailly from the head. Both are seasoned theatre musicians. Gatti will preside over next season’s opening production of Don Carlo, with Tosca, Lulu and Falstaff to follow. Chailly has plenty of engagements in La Scala’s concert series. I wouldn’t bet on either getting the music directorship soon. The job has been watered down since Stéphane Lissner, La Scala’s sovrindendente, combined artistic and administrative power in his own hands. All this suggests that, for the foreseeable future, the archetypal Italian opera experience may exist more in the mind than in reality.

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