Lost in time is the Maestro’s first conception of Verdi’s opera. This is stated by Carlo Centolavigna, Zeffirelli’s historical collaborator since 1983 and a lecturer at the Franco Zeffirelli Foundation.
He has worked alongside the Maestro in major opera productions such as La Traviata in Florence with Cecilia Gasdia, La Scala’s Don Carlo, Aida in Tokyo in 1998 and major Arena productions up to the last Traviata in 2019. In film he is with Zeffirelli for Il giovane Toscanini, Un tè con Mussolini, Storia di una Capinera and 2001’s Callas Forever where he is in charge of the scenes for Carmen.
With Carlo Centolavigna, who also oversaw the staging of Zeffirelli’s Rigoletto in Oman, we try to reconstruct the long road that led to its realization in the Royal Opera House Muscat production, a co-production with Fondazione Arena di Verona and the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre and with the collaboration of Rai Cultura and Raicom.
“Back in the 1990s, Maestro had a clear idea of how to do his Rigoletto. I remember a trip to Mantua with Maestro Zeffirelli, for the inauguration of the reopening of the city’s theater that had been closed for 20 years. The Maestro would have liked to make this Rigoletto for that occasion… And then he was also thinking about a film opera.” Carlo Centolavigna
The project staged last January in Oman had thus already been in the Maestro’s head for many years. Although without its assigned and definitive venue, it was supposed to be the mature version of an opera that Zeffirelli had not tackled for more than 20 years.
The Maestro had already done three different versions of Verdi’s Rigoletto in his career between ’57 and ’64, the last one in London with costumes and sets by the great Lila de’ Nobili. He had not tackled the opera since then, surely awaiting a revision in light of his artistic maturity.
From the testimony of Carlo Centolavigna, already in the last years of the 1900s, Zeffirelli, assisted by his collaborators, was carrying out the mature project of his Rigoletto by fine-tuning the sketches, those currently used, and tackling the next step, the making of the models, while waiting for a propitious opportunity.
It would only be 15 years after those early works, however, that he would be able to announce to the press his new Rigoletto, finally welcomed and financed by the Royal Opera House Muscat.
There are four sketches left by the Maestro to his collaborators, along with director’s notes, reflections for the staging of Rigoletto and models. It was the task of set designer Carlo Centolavigna, after all these years, to take up the material and Zeffirelli’s directions to translate the design into staging for the Muscat theater.
The set design features horizontal Plexiglas elements typical of the stagings of his maturity. Such components, which contribute to the dreamlike atmosphere by allowing suggestive plays of light, were already present in the scenes of Turandot that opened the Royal Opera House in Muscat in 2011.
Carlo Centolavigna explains the value and meanings of the decorative and structural elements of the first sketch that will make up the first act of Zeffirelli’s Rigoletto.
The setting displays the typically Zeffirellian pageantry, but untethered from the realistic features that often (but not always) distinguished his sets. He chooses voluptuous three-dimensional figures of women suspended in the void, a decorative element characterizing the immense hall of the Duke’s palace.
The ephemerality and superficiality of the Duke’s court is expressed precisely in those looming figures who indifferent portents of tragedy, dominating the real life, the drama that will soon unfold in the Duke’s court and in the domestic intimacy of the jester Rigoletto.
Instead, Rigoletto’s return home, his anxieties and Gilda’s dramatic passion are set in the light of greater realism. It is the opera that demands it; the text itself describes the setting in great detail.
“The most deserted end of a blind street. On the left a house of fair appearance with a small courtyard surrounded by a wall. In the court a large and tall tree and a marble seat; in the wall a door leading to the street; above the wall a practicable terrace, supported by arches. The door on the second floor gives onto the said terrace. To the right of the street is the very high wall of the garden, and a side of the palace of Ceprano. It is night.” Booklet by Francesco Maria Piave
Here the horizontal Plexiglas elements capable of giving vibration to the scene by interpenetrating it and at the same time shattering its realism are present only on the horizon. They give way to nature, to the materiality of the place, to the dramatic truth of Gilda’s passion.
In the second act, the Duke’s world, the ephemeral frivolity and cruelty of his court, returns, and so do the transparencies, exactly as in the first act.
Behind the equestrian statue of the Duke, a symbol of the arrogance of power, horizontal elements made of Plexiglas return to shatter reality, accentuating the sinister nature of the powerful court.
It is at the foot of that symbol of power that poor Gilda weeps after leaving the Duke’s rooms.
The wall made of backlit faux marble emphasizes the lightness in contrast to the tragic nature of Rigoletto’s story.
Symbolic and evocative, the wreckage of the third act is a representation of the sordid and sinister environment in which the drama takes place, but also a representation of the tragic denouement.
Zeffirelli chooses the wreck as a symbolic element that interprets and transfigures the home of Sparafucile, a professional hitman, and his accomplice sister Maddalena.
Carlo Centolavigna brings to the stage the wishes of Franco Zeffirelli. The aim is to give concreteness and reality to the initial creative idea, through the choice of materials that are able to reflect the symbolism and peculiarity of the sketches.
In Zeffirelli’s latest Rigoletto, fundamental is the play of transparencies that vary in the different scenes. The backdrops are all backlit to allow, through the different positioning of the lights, to recreate the different atmospheres in the different phases of the opera. In this regard, if the play of backlighting becomes central in the first and second acts, within the ephemeral world of the ducal palace, the backdrops darken with the second scene of the first act and in the third act, where the dimension of human existence takes on all its dramatic heaviness.
The stage elements are made through a careful selection of materials. Once again, for the components that structure the ephemeral lightness of the ducal palace, transparent fiberglass was chosen, able to go along with the play of transparency and light in combination with the backlighting of the backdrops. The shine of the marble of the Duke’s palace then gives way to opaque and somber materials in the scenes where the drama unfolds.
Compenetrating reality by shattering it in a game of deconstructing references, the horizontal plexiglass elements typical of the Maestro’s mature stagings are always present. However, these take on a different relevance depending on the scenes, left unarmed on the horizon in the night scenes, when the weight of Rigoletto and Gilda’s suffering returns strongly. In the first and third Acts.