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  • The Fascination with Distance:An Interview with Luca Ronconi
  • Franco Manfriani
    Translated by Jamuna Samuel

FRANCO MANFRIANI: This is your first Monteverdi production, yet the myth of Orpheus has been very present in your career, from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, which was your debut in Florence together with conductor Riccardo Muti, to Luigi Rossi's Orfeo at La Scala. Do you have a particular predilection for this character?

LUCA RONCONI: I have to say that these were not my personal choices; I simply accepted proposals that were made to me. Undoubtedly, the myth of Orpheus is one of those that is more suited to musical theater, and it does fascinate me to focus, through these three operas, on the various versions of the Orphic myth, to bring out the ways in which this mythological conglomerate travels through the history of opera, and to explore Gluck's point of view with respect to Rossi's and Monteverdi's. This seems to me the most interesting aspect of producing these operas.

MANFRIANI: Do you perceive unifying motives among the three operas?

RONCONI: They are such different operas that the differences struck me more than the similarities. In Rossi's Orfeo I was fascinated by the grand use of theatrical machinery; in that of Gluck by the composer's restoration of clarity, or rather of the possibility of clarity; and in Monteverdi's opera by the beauty and the poetry of a virginity, of a something that is born.

MANFRIANI: Is then what fascinates you the fact that Monteverdi's L'Orfeo is a work belonging to the dawn of opera?

RONCONI: What especially strikes me is the distance that separates us from Monteverdi—not so much from the opera in itself, but from its forms of representation. Today we are used to seeing operas like this one, which belong to the early musical Baroque, in inappropriate settings, designed for subsequent operas, those from the eighteenth century on. In the case of my production of L'Orfeo, I was offered the opportunity to stage it at the Teatro Goldoni in Florence, which is an ideal theater—and this fact too is for me an occasion for interest and for curiosity. I have the possibility of taking advantage of the available space in an [End Page 278] anomalous way, but one that, I hope, is more consonant and appropriate to the nature of this opera and one that makes it possible to unleash a fantasy of how the work was originally performed.

First of all, I am interested in the dimensions of the Teatro Goldoni, which is decidedly small. It is ideal precisely in its relationship to this type of music, to the reduced number of instruments, to that which is asked of the singers. But these reduced dimensions would have penalized a frontal performance onstage. With a traditional spatial arrangement, the architectonic structure would have been more respected than the nature of L'Orfeo. Instead, the scenic designer's and my choice (which certainly will generate discussion) is to occupy the space of the orchestra seats and to move the staging there. This is a choice that seems to me to offer the most appropriate way to realize this opera. I would like to underline that in this staging there is no search for the "new" as an end in itself, because I and others have already used that same space for scenic action in the past. So this is nothing new, but rather a deliberate choice that seems to us legitimized by the nature of Monteverdi's music itself, because the intimacy, the closeness of the singers, the placement of the musicians in full view are all, in fact, legitimate components of a staging of L'Orfeo.

MANFRIANI: In your project, the orchestra space is not simply invaded by the scenic action, it is also filled with water. The water is a symbolic element . . .

RONCONI: No, the water represents nature. If there is in fact some real water in the orchestra space, there is an equally real green lawn on the traditional stage, and we hope that it remains so for...

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