Conversation with Franco Zeffirelli by Giorgio Tabanelli
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Conversation with Franco Zeffirelli By Giorgio Tabanelli When a great twentieth-century Italian poet – Giuseppe Ungaretti – turned eighty he jokingly said to his friends that he was four times twenty years old. In reality the unit of measure with which one prepared to calculate the length of time lived was not a strange notion; it was merely the only known unit of ratio as to real poets and real artists is granted the special grace of eternal youth and sacred immortality. This is what happens with Franco Zeffirelli in the act of paying him homage: acknowledging that youth never extinguished nor placated and a genius that goes beyond mortal time. Many ask why in Italy fate, or destiny, or in any case an inscrutable superior will, has entrusted Florentines and Tuscans over the centuries with a particular mission, that of holding high the flag of human genius, of presenting it and testifying it to men through forms of art and human expression. And perhaps there are many who wonder why such an enviable gift is given by fortune to few chosen men whose personality and character sometimes seem to contradict, whether in a veiled or spectacular manner, the high task assigned to them. But as Zeffirelli himself reminds us in the long conversation he wanted to grant us, it is a system of natural defence able to protect the personality of artists from a world that seems to be straying more and more from true ideals and humane dimensions. In other words, the high skill of artists is to draw men back to their humanity, to their sense of responsibility and to remind them that without love and without passion for life the world would be nothing but an arid sandglass and a sad quagmire devoid of hope and meaning. Zeffirelli has remained loyal over time to this abundant image of man and his lengthy artistic career represents the development and achievement of these high ideals. Cavalleria Rusticana Franco Zeffirelli, if you think back to your earliest memories, to the very beginnings of your artistic career, of the people, the places and the circumstances connected with this period, which of them instantly spring to mind? For someone like me, born in Florence in the early twenties, in a particular period and in a well-to-do society which aspired to great achievements, there already existed an environment which in some way favoured an artistic vocation. In my family there was always a baritone with a beautiful voice ready to show off his gift at the first opportunity. There were also talented people who knew how to paint or draw; in short, there was a desire for art at every level. I recall that, whenever I drew a little sketch, my family would say: “He has the makings of a great artist, it’s not for nothing that in our blood flows that of Leonardo da Vinci”, because my family’s roots are in Vinci. When my father was ailing, and I made my debut at Covent Garden at a Gala in the presence of the Queen of England, he sent me a package containing a large envelope in which were the certificates from the Commune of Vinci proving that one of our forbears was the cousin of Leonardo da Vinci, and my father wrote me a letter telling me: “Tomorrow evening, when you find yourself next to the Queen of England, hold your head up high because if she descends from the Windsor lineage, you descend from Leonardo da Vinci.” This is by way of illustrating how the need for art was so sweetly and pathetically felt. As a child, it was very difficult for me to identify the spark which ignited my vocation as an artist: I was born into art. To what extent did your family influence your artistic and spiritual formation? My mother and father loved each other very much though they were both married to other people, so I was born out of wedlock. My mother died when I was six years old. Fortunately, I was adopted by my aunts, who were surrounded by artists and painters. At an early age I became very familiar with all these things: singers, painters, art experts. There were musical events where the greatest voices and the grand conductors performed, and then of course the Maggio Musicale festival in Florence. I began going to the opera at the age of seven or eight and so it’s in my blood. Perhaps one of the reasons for my success is that I have always known the opera from within, so to speak, and not from without, and from the art of singing and from memorable occasions which these authors have given us. As a youth, who had most influence on you as regards the development of understanding and intellect? In Florence I attended the Accademia di Belle Arti, at which there were a great number of important people: there was Rosai who taught there, and Professor Pacini, an extraordinary professor of History of Art, not to mention a great professor of Ornamental Design, Professor Crepet. I spent a lot of time at the Convent of San Marco where there was a youth association to which I belonged and there, too were extraordinary men such as Annigoni, and La Pira [former mayor of Florence], who came to pass the best part of his day there. He taught History of Roman Law in Florence and lived in the convent of San Marco. I learnt English from a woman who had moved to Florence when young, after having lost her father and her fiancé in the war, and she taught in a little room where one could also cook. She taught me English and much else besides. She taught me world ethics, a word which today might sound a little strange…that which is right and that which is wrong, because she was deeply worried about us young lads growing up with a distorted view of the truth. As a boy I was therefore well nourished on these opportunities which set me on the right path. La Pira, for example, said that Fascism, Nazism and Communism were all the same thing, they were the enemies of man, the evil of the century. I learnt to love Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri and other great writers of European and American literature. I then passed on to architecture and I worked with men like Michelucci, Gamberini and other great exponents of that field, which served to form my ideas not so much in terms of architecture as in to understand how to construct a definitive image. I generally begin with an idea while thinking about where I want to arrive: I observed how they worked, how they tracked an idea and worked on it. The work of an architect is very precise, as are all those creative professions which have to do with structure. Which painters have inspired your figurative taste? I have always been in love with the Renaissance. For me painting begins to explode with Masaccio’s Cacciata dei progenitori or rather Cacciata dal paradiso. This is the beginning of man, painters finally began to depict man in his misery, naked, unfortunate and hopeless, a woman by his side as together they are banished from paradise. It is the strongest emotion created. Then I would say the measure of Brunelleschi’s architecture, Leon Battista Alberti, from which I have always adopted this structuring of visual ideas with a central design. In my set designs there is always a central axis, there’s an obsession with the central line of the stage which, however, is a reference that everyone should adopt, the line to refer to is the axis from which everything starts and on which a scenic construction is structured. So, a reference which is not only pictorial, I would say without limits, without definition but full of emotion. Emotion is then superimposed on the technical structuring of the set, the whole human world in motion within is then superimposed: passions, emotions, choruses, colours, time, grand ideas, but always generated in the mind with a very precise geometric structure. Carmen You were a student of architecture. Plasticity, as well as the pictorial element, is at the root of your training as a scenographer. Would you agree? Space on stage, as at the cinema, has to be observed very carefully. A remote detail has the value of a protagonist in close-up. But, when I prepare for filming or for a stage production, I work on the characters, on the emotions, I’m attentive to what one character or another feels. I’m very attentive to the power of close-ups: yes, composition is important, then there are frames, scenes, the sense of spectacularity, they are all necessary, but in the end what presses me most of all is to be good at directing a close-up because that’s where an actor or actress tells me who they are. In the years when you were a student you performed at Radio Firenze and in student theatre groups. How important has acting been for you and for what reason did you give it up? More or less everyone has had this experience and by this I don’t mean to consider myself a bit of a genius. I could act because I was good-looking, vain, I had a desire to express myself, a desire to be the centre of attention, to stand out and I even did well because I won a competition for Florentine amateur dramatics.