Another big name is present at Moff, the Messina Opera Film Festival, and it is Andrea Andermann. Director, producer and true pioneer of live melodrama worldwide. The festival will pay him a tribute with the revival of four films which, between 1992 and 2012, revolutionized the way of enjoying opera on television: Tosca in Rome and Traviata in Paris, directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Rigoletto in Mantua, directed by Marco Bellocchio, and Cenerentola, directed by Carlo Verdone. He will hold a masterclass on Thursday.
How long did you brood this genius opera on TV before making it explode?
«The need, not the intuition, occurred at the beginning, totally in the first months of my activity, when I was a student at the University of Paris at the Sorbonne, in the Faculty of Letters with a specialization in theatre, but I also attended other courses. My professor was Roland Barthes, so not bad I’d say.”
Yes… “Fragments of a love discourse” comes to mind…
«Exactly, and the other professor, in another field that I followed as a volunteer, was Claude Lévi-Strauss, so I’m talking about a dream university. I wasn’t even twenty years old and I was called as assistant director by a gentleman called Franco Zeffirelli. At that moment, at the Paris Opera, he was staging La Tosca with Maria Callas. Then, immediately afterwards, and for two years, continuing to be Zeffirelli’s assistant director, the show in which I participated was “La Lupa” by Verga, starring Anna Magnani. So, for me, starting with the possibility of living together in the closed nucleus of an opera or a theater, and we went on tour everywhere, in the Soviet Union, in Europe… well, I already felt the limitation, in some way I wouldn’t say claustrophobia but almost. And then it all started from there. In the meantime I did some television… so the core, the need, was born then, then I took it up again.”
This project was incredibly complex but it succeeded wonderfully all over the world…
«So, I believe I have developed, someone said we created with live films, the New York Times wrote it, others wrote it, in short, that we created a new language, because I believe that this need to live together for two days was exceptional. Here, the fact of being on a weekend with Tosca in Rome, in Sant’Andrea della Valle, in Palazzo Farnese, in Castel Sant’Angelo, and therefore living the story to the full, is nothing more than a soap opera. Opera in the 19th century is on TV today, they are the same thing… love, death, passion, there is someone who is killed, someone who hates. Keep in mind that for nine years, out of the first ten that were used for Tosca, as Patroni Griffi has said several times, we did it with the utmost recklessness. Do you think that in those nine years, in Rome, you don’t know how many said to me “a doctor, not if a while ago…”. Well, on the morning of July 12, ’92, when we were all, at six in the morning, lying on the terrace of Castel Sant’Angelo, and Zubin Mehta who had conducted from the auditorium joined us, all with tears because it had been a tension of years, that same technician came to me and said: “see you doctor if a little while ago…””.
Do you feel, for you, “in its own right”, as Totò said, what does opera represent?
«Look, my mother was Viennese, my family owned an entire village on my father’s side in what is now Ukraine, which was then the Austro-Hungarian empire… I couldn’t help but do this type of thing… Jewishness, Central Europe, passion flow in my blood… I’m not a musician by training but I’m lucky enough to have an ear that can hear a violin in the last row that goes out of tune. And then for opera it is, how can I say… harmony, that is, there is something that happens behind it which is its strength, opera is the indispensable bread of my daily life, and mind you that for me music is not just classical music.”
But when did your first encounter with melodrama happen?
«I wasn’t born in Italy, but it doesn’t mean anything to me, there’s a beautiful definition that Magris gives of Yiddish Land, he says “it belonged to the homeland of the countryless”… my very first relationship with music, with opera, was at concerts… what were they called, “Martini and Rossi” I think, on the radio, they were opera areas and I remember that as a child, I think they were on Mondays, I waited for them because I adored that thing and I loved Andrea very much Chenier. Then I never asked myself the problem, now I do it like this… no, I start… I feel free to do anything, especially since I have always conceived it, developed it, tested it, in some cases directed it as a director, because in the first phase I was my own director and producer. And then with these blockbusters what I did was enough for me, so whatever I did I followed in every detail, because in my opinion the producer is the one who worries about what others have to worry about.”
Your collaborations with two giants like Moravia and Flaiano on a series of wonderful TV documentaries that left an impression on you?
«So… with Flaiano, who hated television and had never done anything for television, it was a wonderful relationship, he was a wonderful creature, a unique case in Italian literature of the second half of the twentieth century, and not only for the deadly jokes that are still used and abused today. For me it was an immense fortune, because among other things, as you well know, with five words you told a world, and for me who believe that in images, even in long sequence shots, without words, the caption can only be a synthesis of the story and not the story, because images make cinema. Moravia, for me and for Rada (the actress Rada Rassimov, ed.) was an adopted son for over twenty years, he was more than double our age. For over twenty years, often with Rada, but not always, sometimes first with Dacia Maraini, then with Carmen Llera, we went around the world, especially in Africa. And Moravia, as you know well, had another type of relationship, much more dialectical, much more, let’s say, intellectual, much more philosophical with life and with everything. Very, very cheerful person, contrary to what his image conveyed. The last trip was in 90, two months before he left, it was a trip to Ireland. And so it was a very intense relationship with him.”
She went with Moravia to the Idroscalo when they killed Pasolini…
«I absolutely went there, and from there the idea for the film that I then made was born. When I arrived shortly afterwards, there was no one there. The place was very sad… I picked up with my own hands a shattered brick with blood stains, a beam of the type used for construction work, crumbled and with blood stains… and then we moved away from there. At the time I had, I don’t know if anyone else had, an unreleased recording by Pasolini, of one of his poems called “The boys down in the field”, where in ’62, 13 years before his death, he describes his death, metaphorically. The boys down in the camp slaughter their ancestors, sell them at the market, which is impressive. For four years it all stayed inside me…”.
Listen… do you have any preference between cinema and opera?
«But think how beautiful cinema and opera are together, why deprive yourself of that…».
Maybe the only thing that can unite all this is poetry, as always?
«I agree with you 100%, this question makes me very happy, my acquaintance with Pasolini began when at the age of 20 or so I read all his books of poetry, so yes absolutely, it is the maximum quota of any expressive form, if it becomes cinema-form but poetic, theater but poetic, which does not mean in verse…».
Is there an unrealized project that fascinates you, what do you want to do in the long term?
«With me it’s always between 5 and 10 years for anything to happen, and without the contribution of Rai which made 350 people available to me for the works, it wouldn’t have been possible. Think about it, the first experiment I did with RAI was in 1981, do you know who Vladimir Horowitz was?
Vaguely… (one of the greatest pianists of all time, ed.)…
«It had been 30 years since he had returned to Europe, capricious like a prima donna, he had made the commitment to return to Europe and play in London and at La Scala. He goes to London, plays, and a few days later decides, as usual, to cancel La Scala! I had already made an agreement, I had to get the satellite, I had made a commitment for Rai to film the concert when he came to La Scala but he didn’t come… well I took the plane, I went to London, and I convinced him that I would have had it played at La Scala without him going. He looks at me very perplexed, I explain to him that I would have filmed him playing, projected it onto a screen as big as the proscenium at La Scala, filmed him like a Chinese box, filmed the audience at La Scala and broadcast it live on television. I convinced him and that’s what I did, it was just recklessness.”
If I tell you about a great drama in the seventies called Michael Strogoff, what answer will you say…? (one of the protagonists of the time, Rada Rassimov, who played the gypsy Sangarre, is his lifelong companion)
«Eh eh, I’m lucky to have a gypsy like me next to me. In those years Rada created a wonderful project that belonged to Visconti, the Trial of Maria Tarnowska, the Russian woman for whom 11 lovers committed suicide. It was a true story, our house was under siege, they wanted to see who the actress who played her was, yes, she has done many dramas… it’s not easy, she’s a real gypsy, she’s Serbian. My blood comes from there, from beyond the Balkans, but we are there.”