Drama in the wings at La Scala

By David Willey BBC News, Milan

A production of Tristan and Isolde conducted by Daniel Barenboim has opened at La Scala opera house in Milan with a British artist in the lead role for the first time in decades.

Where else would Daniel Barenboim - the maestro and former child prodigy pianist who, at the apex of his long and distinguished musical career, is now the chief conductor of La Scala - choose to stay when he is in Milan?

Of course, the Grand Hotel de Milan, the staid and slightly stuffy 19th Century five-star hotel in the Via Manzoni, five minutes walk from La Scala.

The hotel became the town home of Giuseppe Verdi for the last 20 years of his life.

Verdi, hero-worshipped for his unforgettable arias by his fellow Italians, actually died in his suite at the hotel in 1901.

Hotel staff laid straw on the cobblestones below his window to prevent the maestro's rest being disturbed by the clatter of carriages as he lay dying.

Anyone who counts in the musical world in Milan always stays at this hotel. The concierge reeled off the famous guests of the past: after Verdi, the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso and, of course, Maria Callas were all guests.

English Tristan
I met Mr Barenboim at his hotel and walked with him to the theatre on the day of the dress rehearsal.
He told me he was delighted to have chosen and nurtured his new English Tristan.

He and Ian Storey - the tenor from Country Durham in the north of England, who is singing the lead role in the Wagner opera - have been working closely together on the music for the past seven months.

Mr Barenboim said Mr Storey's German diction was perfect, although he does not actually speak the language.
"The days when only Germans were considered capable of interpreting German music and Italians of Italian music have long since passed," the maestro said.

"We take it for granted now that people from India and China are capable of penetrating European culture.
"There are national characteristics in music, but it is not only the citizens of that country who have the ability, or the right, to interpret it. That would be a dangerous path to follow."

Phoenix-like
As we passed through the labyrinth of corridors and rehearsal rooms of the newly refurbished La Scala, I remembered that the opera house - originally built at the end of the 18th Century and twice in its history gutted by fire - had recently been closed for three years while the entire stage complex was rebuilt to modern standards.

Members of the 135-strong orchestra threatened to disrupt the opening night with a strike

Around a stage that looks the size of a football pitch, huge new mechanical hoists can shift tons of scenery above and under ground by simply pressing a button.

One of the backdrops for the new opera looked suspiciously to me like a bit of ancient Roman wall.
It turned out that the set designer has actually made fibreglass casts of an entire section of the city wall built in Rome by the Emperor Aurelian and transported them in pieces to Milan.

Did they have trouble getting permission, I asked? "Actually, we never asked," was the artful reply.
The dress rehearsal for the five-hour Wagner epic was attended by an audience made up mainly of friends and relatives of the 800 permanent employees of the opera house.

Strike threat
But there had been rumblings of discontent among members of the 135-strong orchestra. They were not getting enough money and threatened to disrupt the opening night with a strike.

While the passionate drama of the first act unfolded on stage with Tristan and Isolde downing their love potions, union representatives called a meeting with the harassed-looking general administrator during the first interval.
Two concert performances had to be cancelled last month due to squabbles between the management and the unions.

News now came that one of La Scala's main sponsors, a well-known Milanese industrialist, had decided to suspend his annual $3m (£1.5m) subsidy to the theatre.

Another frenetic management meeting took place during the second interval. The strike was averted by the payment of a bonus.

But some members of the orchestra were still dissatisfied that their skills were not being sufficiently recognised by getting a larger bonus than the stagehands and seamstresses.

The opera business is just like any other form of show business - volatile and unpredictable.
But the passion of Italians for opera, which after all they invented, remains undiminished.

As Gioacchino Rossini once famously boasted: "Give me a laundry list, and I'll set it to music!"

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7133037.stm© BBC MMVIII

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