IV. LA WALKIRIA AT LA SCALA, 1974
On 20 March 1973, less than two months after Visconti’s painful decision, La Scala staged L’oro del Reno The production was hastily imported from Munich’s Nationaltheater and bore the signature of Günther Rennert, although it had been directed by Peter Windgassen, while the set designs were by Johannes Dreher and costumes by Liselotte Erler. The production dated back to 1969 and was less than conventional. Once it became clear that Visconti would incapable of undertaking the task of working on the following parts of the Ring, the director himself named as his replacement Luca Ronconi, called for the first time to La Scala. Sawallisch would have preferred Dieter Haugk, with whom he was already working on the preparations for Parsifal in Munich.
At that time, the forty-year-old Ronconi had very limited experience in the opera, having worked only on contemporary compositions by names such as Busoni, Honegger and Globokar. His single standard opera had been a “more African rather than Spanish” Carmen, at the Arena in Verona, in which Pier Luigi Pizzi, responsible for the scenes and costumes, had involved him. However, following the success of his 1969 production at Spoleto of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in an adaptation by Edoardo Sanguineti, he had become the stage director of the day and was about to be nominated by Carlo Ripa di Meana as the head of the Theatre and Music section of the renewed Venice Biennale.
There was an air of change that wished to free the Ring of the by now conventional abstract and vague interpretations. Evidence of this could be seen in Joachim Herz’s work in Leipzig, where from 1973 he immersed the stories of the Nibelungs in the Germany of the 19th and 20th centuries, with an eye on George Bernard Shaw’s Perfect Wagnerite. Nor should Hebbel’s play, Die Nibelungen, directed in Cologne in the same year by Heyme, be disregarded.
Ronconi’s La Walkiria, with designs by Pizzi, who had begun working at La Scala in 1962 on Il Trovatore, directed by Giorgio De Lullo and conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni, represented a crucial innovation, which Sawallisch neither understood nor approved. It is a critical, historicising interpretation, with multiple levels and on stage is unpredictable. The first day of the Ring is transformed into a private, intimate story, stripped of the emphasis and the wide-open spaces of nature, the story of a family, a society. In a grandiose late-19th-century salon, full of mirrors and drapes, where, as if in a museum, the late Romantic stage machinery, such as the rack for the ride of the Valkyries, comes back to life, Wagner assumes something of the tones of a middle-class drama, while Fricka has something of Cosima Wagner about her.
At the premiere on 11 March 1974, scuffles broke out in the auditorium and continued during the night outside on the square with reports reaching the newspapers. The director and set designer had their defenders, however, who included Lorenzo Arruga, Duilio Courir – who considered Ronconi’s La Walkiria comparable only to Visconti’s Manon, staged that year, after the première in 1973, in Spoleto – Fedele d’Amico and Mario Messinis, with the most enthusiastic supporter being Giovanni Testori.
