Italy's opera bouffe

Peter Nichols

Rome

I remember some years ago the occasional appearances of a well-known, now late, British music critic with no knowledge of conversational Italian who used to control his taxidriver in those days of cheerful chaos on Rome's streets by hissing from the back seat with the malevolent authority of Toscanini 'Adagio! Adagio!' occasionally

adding `Ma non troppo!' when the traffic jammed to a complete and ear-shattering halt. He was the living symbol of the outlook that all the world's a stage and in their corner of it, Italians are particularly operatic.

Of course it was not true, but Italians did not mind encouraging the impression. There used to be an elderly little man who frequented the gallery at the Rome Opera House and on Rossini nights he would stand up on his bench as soon as the lights were dimmed and conduct the whole performance with good-natured support from his neighbours. He was surely popular not Just because he was obviously a pleasant extrovert (at least in the semi-dark) but represented the false idea which Italians quite liked to spread about themselves, and have only ceased doing in the last few years. They have now gone a big step ahead. With the mass arrests last week of leading personalities in the operatic world, including the Rome house's artistic director, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, the opera has suddenly become the symbol of much of what is wrong with the country.

The transformation came about on Tuesday of last week when police swooped on the homes and offices of opera officials and agents, carrying them off to prison on charges of corruption and fraud. Three dozen of them were put behind bars, including the immensely respected Francesco Siciliani, artistic director of Rome's Academy of St Cecilia. Some were released after interrogation. The assistant public prosecutor in charge of the inquiry, Nino

Fico, was roughly handled by some sections of the press on the grounds that his putsch went far beyond what any possible circumstances could demand and protests were heard of the indignity of placing eminent intellectuals in cells with 'thieves and rapists.'

Luckily the police action came at the end of the season. And as far as Rome is concerned, at the end of a season which has shown a great improvement in artistic standards. The superintendent, Luca di Schiena, is a journalist and has fought hard to protect his new regime from a demoralising series of attacks. In fact, a number of signs have been favourable for well-wishers of opera in Italy. La Scala has naturally provided Milan with a lavish season to mark its two-hundredth birthday. At the same time, its experiments in broadening its audience-base have been encouraging especially with young people. Riccardo Muti's work at Florence with Massimo Bogiancko, the most consistently successful of Italy's superintendents, has brought fresh standards to the preparation and performance of Verdi. The thirteen opera houses cost the taxpayer a lot of money in subsidies: about 1,000 million lire (£70 million) a year. But latterly the money was beginning to look better spent.

Some of it, that is. Fico's charges are based on a double line of attack. He maintains that the officials and agents he arrested were suspected of having broken the 1967 law which regulates opera and which specifically bans the work of any intermediaries between artists and managements, even if these agents work for no fee (which is hardly likely). He maintains that not only are agents at work but they are parties to a form of corruption which means that a share of the state subsidies ends in the pockets of the illegal agents who also have a stranglehold on who can and who cannot sing in Italian opera houses. These are the allegations. Few doubt (including Lanza Tomasi himself in a public statement) that there is some truth in the charges. Hopefully, they will be defined by process of law.

There are worse aspects than this. The 1967 law is inapplicable because a series of governments have done nothing to carry out its essential proposal for establishing a public body to take the place of the agents' activities which it bans. This is simple neglect of the legislator's duty. Probably the law would be unsatisfactory in any event. The idea of a public body acting as intermediary between artists and opera managements sounds grotesquely incongruous. But it would have been better than nothing, if nothing means that impresarios incur the constant risk of imprisonment amidst their other worries. Parliament hardly has the right to complain at what either the public prosecutor or the opera managements are doing if it has failed to provide the opera with a proper legal framework.

Individual politicians however have seen a way of exploiting the legal uncertainties — and presumed offences committed — to partisan advantage. Italy's opera houses are administered by the municipalities. In the course of the last three years, most of the big cities have been taken over by left-wing administra.ions, including Rome which has a mayor elected from the Communist left. On balance, the most successful opera houses lean leftward: Luca di Schiena in Rome is a Catholic but not a conservative and is frequently attacked for alleged sympathies on the left. Lanza Tomasi, like Sylvano Bussotti at La Fenice, is a Communist. La Scala and the Florence theatre are nominally in Socialist hands. Hence, some people immediately saw a political conspiracy behind the charges as a means of preventing the left from maintaining its traditionally strong position in cultural affairs.

The theory of a plot is important both as a symptom and an illness. It indicates once again the Italian insistence on assessing praise or blame along political lines and not by achievement. The Italian political situation is in a confused state as a result of the Moro kidnapping and the general tendency looks like being more conservative than for many years. And so the opera houses, rightly or wrongly, are seen to be a fair battleground for a political contest, one of many. The label counts and not the result.

Corruption is a political issue: responsible legislation is not. The object is to find a means for blaming the political opponent for mishandling the state's money: the alleged offence is not enough.

This attitude explains why the judicial arm's intervention looked so heavy handed. It was on its own in what Fico was heard to call an 'ultra-corrupt' situation, and he is backed in his actions by a group of

singers — variously judged on artistic grounds — who claim that the system unfairly denied them the right to work. The

whole affair may only be a symptom but at least it makes the point that, in the light of the accusations, the less 'operatic' the country is the better.