Scaling heights at La Scala
Peter Cunningham heads to Italy’s fashion capital and swaps couture for culture with a night at the magnificent Milanese opera
Milan, the Italian centre of fashion, finance and industry, is also the home of Teatro Alla Scala, one of the best known opera houses in the world. I am here to see Elektra by Richard Strauss, a one-act opera based on the Greek tragedy. Tickets are hard to come by. Apart from the tourists who come here all year round, the Milanese support their opera with the passion and commitment of football supporters for their home team.
The weather is showery since the clock has gone back, but it’s still warm enough for only a light jacket. I’m staying in the Baglioni Hotel Carlton, ten minutes’ walk from La Scala. This delightful and discreet boutique hotel is set back in a small courtyard, and run by people for whom no trouble is too much. My room, on the fifth floor, looks out over rooftops towards Milan Cathedral, the Duomo. I set out along cobblestoned streets to find my way to the opera house.
Milan is all about style. The fashion catalogues from this city inform what much of the chic world wears. Fashion can be seen everywhere on the Corso Venezia, and on the little adjoining streets and in the coffee shops.
I pass the soaring Duomo, reluctantly, because I’m already late for a tour of La Scala which lies on the other side of the vast Galleria Vittorio Emanuele.
Opera is the heartbeat of Milan: the citizens of this bustling city of 1.3million regard the legendary opera house as their personal property. ‘La Scala’ means stairway in Italian, and this stairway to heavenly music first opened in 1778, was bombed in 1943, and then refurbished over two years beginning in 2002. A contemporary, white block now rises behind the traditional neo-classical façade.
This new addition was necessary to house the many sets needed for the constant turnover of productions that any modern opera house needs to attract a flow of audiences. Opinion is divided on this new construction between those who agree La Scala has had to step into the 21st century, and those who regard the extension as a carbuncle.
Opera houses all over Italy, from Naples to Venice, are often a reflection
GILT-FACED BOXES RISE FOR SIX FLOORS ABOVE THE AUDITORIUM
of what is found in Milan, where the understated exterior provides little clue to what is found within. Here, in La Scala, a horseshoe of gilt-faced boxes rise for six floors above the main auditorium. Originally, many of these boxes were owned outright by local aristocratic families, who came along to the show with their servants, including cooks. Despite the recent refurbishment, a stone-floored box from this past era has been left intact. Lined with wall mirrors so that people-watching could take place unobtrusively, this box still retains its fireplace, once needed in winter to keep the blue blood of the patrons circulating. Behind the box, across a narrow corridor, a dedicated kitchen and pantry reflect how things used to be.
I’m brought down below the stage, into the orchestra pit, where the score for Elektra, tonight’s performance, is being laid out at each position. The hum of a busy theatre gearing up for a show is so exciting. On the stage they’re taking down the set on which a rehearsal for a musical version of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Endgame’ has been taking place. More than 30 stagehands are putting tonight’s set in place.
The gilded reception halls of this theatre have statues to honour the great Italian composers: Verdi, Puccini and Rossini all look down implacably from their marble plinths. La Scala’s little museum, beside the theatre, has further busts, in marble and bronze, of the great men who, in their day, were as famous as the Beatles.
A portrait of the great soprano, Maria Callas, can be seen here, not far from the portrait of Callas’s great rival, Renata Tebaldi. Opinion on which lady was the greatest singer still divides the patrons of Milanese dinner tables, as it did their parents’.
Soft rain is falling over Milan. With time to spare before the opera, I head along Via Verdi and then Via Brera until I come to Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan’s wonderful art museum. The Brera Academy and the Braidense National Library can also be found here. Up two steep sets of steps to the gallery – there is a lift – a massive marble statue of a naked Napoleon Bonaparte dominates the hall.
The great names of the Italian Renaissance fill these halls with enormous canvasses: Veronese, Tintoretto, Bellini and Caravaggio. In many cases these artists imposed medieval life as they knew it on to biblical scenes and, in the process, left us a graphic insight into everyday life in the Middle Ages.
Beside Brera there’s a little restaurant called Nabucco. As I sit outside with a plate of spaghetti alle vongole and a glass of Chianti, my neighbour, who says he is from near Trieste, asks my nationality. When I tell him he cries: ‘Ah! Irlanda! James Joyce! He is our Dante!’
It takes no more than 15 minutes to get back on foot to the hospitable Baglioni where a welcoming cup of tea and little almond biscotti await me. I need to change, and then return to La Scala for the show. No dress code prevails in La Scala any-
more. And yet, this being Milan, the style on view challenges everyone to make an effort. Jewelimbedded jeans, suede high-heels and limbs encased in shimmering leather all glide under Verdi’s watchful marble eye. For the men, in jackets and open-necked shirts, a neck-scarf is the only concession to the season.
Elektra, a vividly homicidal one-act Greek tragedy, is a ground-breaking work of sustained drama. Half-mad with grieving for her dead father, Agamemnon, Elektra conspires to avenge his death by killing her terrifyingly evil mother, Chrysothemis. She is helped in this endeavour by Orest, her brother, who has been banished, but has returned in disguise.
Elektra, first performed in 1909, is a modernist opera, focusing on the emotional and psychological turmoil of the lead character, with the frequent use of cacophony, which over a century ago shocked audiences used to melody. Tonight, Elektra is played by soprano, Ricarda Merbeth, Orest by the baritone, Michael Volle. The conductor is Christoph Von Dohnanyi. The tension of the tragedy builds relentlessly, in a sustained operatic marathon, until the demands of blood are finally satisfied and Elektra dances to her end.
I’m in need of a drink after so much drama, so it’s off by taxi to meet a group of friends at La Pesa, an old trattoria, famous for osso buco and risotto al salto. Ho Chi Minh once lived overhead and worked in this restaurant as a waiter. We finish off the evening with glasses of grappa, toasting the approach of the mid-winter.
Next morning, I’m out at first light at the Duomo. A lift takes me up to the roof of this cathedral, the fourth largest in the world, on which construction began in 1386 and was not completed for nearly six centuries.
The building is made entirely from marble quarried from the area around Lake Maggiore. In every niche, from every column, peer the effigies of saints and angels. I wander the marble rooftops, looking down on the chequerboard Piazza del Duomo. Later, inside the cavernous cathedral, tiny, votive candles flicker defiantly.
I have just enough time to take a taxi across to Via Santa Marta and do some last-minute shopping before heading back to the airport and home.
Peter Cunningham’s latest novel Acts of Allegiance is longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2019.