III. LA VESTALE AND LA SONNAMBULA, 1954-1955

When La vestale made its triumphant debut at La Scala on 7 December 1954, Visconti was 48 years old  and already a highly acclaimed film and theatre director. His most recent film, Senso, featured an opening scene inside Venice’s Teatro La Fenice during a performance of Il trovatore; the idea had come to him as he watched Maria Callas sing Il trovatore at La Scala in 1953.  Visconti’s production of Gaspare Spontini’s opera La vestale, to a libretto by Étienne de Jouy, starred Callas as Giulia, the titular Vestal Virgin. With Antonino Votto conducting, the performance was in Italian, although Spontini had composed the 1807 opera in French. The sets and costumes were by Pietro Zuffi, a painter who had turned his hand to the theatre. Between 7 December 1954 and 5 March 1955, Visconti moved from the Neoclassicism of La vestale to the Romanticism of Vincenzo Bellini’s La sonnambula, again with Callas in the leading role. With a libretto by Felice Romani, La sonnambula had premiered in Milan at Teatro Carcano in 1831. The tone was drastically different now, not least because of the new creative team, beginning with the great Leonard Bernstein at the podium. Sets and costumes were by Piero Tosi, a young Florentine who had been a close collaborator of Visconti’s for several years and would remain so until the end of the director’s career.