V. SIGFRIDO, LA SCALA, 1975
The somewhat stormy reception of La Walkiria compromised relations with Sawallisch. Pier Luigi Pizzi was despatched to Munich to persuade the reluctant conductor to work with the same team on Sigfrido, which was scheduled at La Scala for 7 March 1975. Ronconi and Pizzi had just won acclaim with Gounod’s Faust at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale, which had debuted on 18 February, and between 16 February and 16 March, the extraordinary re-working of their 1969 production of Orlando Furioso was broadcast nationally on Sunday evenings on prime-time television in five parts. In this version, the spaces of the piazza are replaced by the enclosed courts, where, as in the Valkyrie, the mystery of the stage machinery is on view.
La Scala’s Sigfrido follows the visual code of the previous day of the Ring, but the opera itself demands a more marked fantastic quality – for example, the bear – for which Ronconi had a particular feel. Indeed, the director’s familiarity with the Nibelung saga lay in an illustrated volume by Diego Valeri titled Il romanzo di Sigfrido, which was published in a collection of books for children. Ronconi admitted that, as well as his childhood reading, he was also influenced by Theodor Adorno’s essay on Wagner.
In this production, realistic images alternate with those taken from the Romantic tradition of the theatre and the scene changes are more frequent than required by the libretto itself. Nature is conjured up as the imaginings of the 19th-century middle classes and by exploiting Josef Hoffmann’s sketches for the 1876 production of the Ring at Bayreuth. When Wotan enters as a wayfarer, similar to Tischbein’s portrait of Goethe, the storehouses of a theatre appear with the backdrops rolled up in piles. On the other hand, the dragon’s cave is closed by a metal shutter, and the monster is given human form and represents a Clockwork Orange-type gang encountered on an uphill road. Alberich appears as a 19th-century banker, while the sword, Notung, is a laser beam, an incredible precursor to the ones used in Star Wars.
Although reactions to the production were far less violent than those saved for Die Walküre, they still caused Sawallisch, who regretted the missed opportunity of working with Visconti, to abandon Il Crepuscolo degli dei, scheduled for the following year. La Scala approached other conductors such as Rudolf Kempe and Rafael Kubelik, but these attempts to involve them in the project, which was to include, after, a new Rheingold by Ronconi and Pizzi, all came to nothing. Even Ingrid Bjoner, who played Brunhilde in La Walkiria and in Sigfrido, was unwilling to embark on the enterprise. In the meantime, news began to circulate that the thirty-one-year-old Patrice Chéreau, well-known with Milan audiences and often engaged at the Piccolo Teatro between 1969 and 1972, had been nominated as director for the 1976-production of the Ring in Bayreuth.
