Luciano Damiani

Luciano Damiani (* 14. July 1923 in Bologna , † 20th June 2007 ) was an Italian stage and costume designer and director .

Life and beginning of career

Damiani grew up as one of three sons of a post clerk in Bologna in the Bolognina district, one of his childhood friends was the later prominent opera tenor Gianni Raimondi . After primary school, Damiani initially studied at the Istituto Tecnico Guglielmo Marconi and, as a child in fascist Italy , acquired support for a visit to the Liceo artistico through drawings by Mussolini and copies of Raphael . Then he received a scholarship and was able to visit the Collegio Venturoli in Castelnuovo di Garfagnana near Lucca , as well as the Liceo, an institution of the fascist state. In 1942 he was chosen by the state to make a trip to what was then the German Reich, which took him to Villach , Vienna , Salzburg and Munich . Because of his studies Damiani was initially spared from being drafted into military service. Later, when he still had to become a soldier, he owed it to the turmoil of the near end of the war that he was spared participating in combat operations. However, because of his membership in the army of the Republic of Salò, he was arrested and charged as a fascist, but acquitted. Finally, in 1946, he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in his hometown of Bologna, where he was taught by Giorgio Morandi , among others . He received first prize for a picture and was elected student representative, although two professors rejected him because of his alleged fascist past. Damiani's father was able to clear up the misunderstanding in a personal conversation. At this time he began to design his first stage sets for the university theater, including pieces by Luigi Pirandello and Eugene O'Neill .

With Giorgio Fumi, he founded an agency dedicated to the design of film posters. From 1949 he managed the agency alone and with increasing success. At the same time he intensified his stage design work in Bologna: at the La Soffitta Theater , Italy's second Teatro Stabile after the Piccolo Teatro in Milan , and at the Teatro Comunale. There he met the heads of the Piccolo Teatro, Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler , who saw his sets. A few days later Damiani was invited by telegram of Grassi, the stage set for the Strehler Staging to piece sulle Acque Cammino of Orio Vergani design. At the same time he was commissioned by the Italian branch of the US production company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to design cinema advertising, posters and newspaper advertisements for Quo Vadis , for which Damiani, now married and father of a son, was later awarded a prize.

International career as a set and costume designer

Damiani closed his Bolognese agency and moved to Milan with his wife Sara and son Davide, where he designed other sets for the Piccolo Teatro. He also worked on the then existing small stage of La Scala in Milan , the Piccola Scala: in 1955 for Strehler's production of Domenico Cimarosa's opera Il matrimonio segreto (later shown as a guest performance throughout Europe). Damiani was able to realize his ideas as comprehensively as possible for the first time with Bertolazzi's El nost Milan . Later, for Strehler's Platonov e gli altri (a version by Anton Chekhov's Platonov ), he also designed the costumes for the first time. Between 1959 and 1963 Damiani designed the equipment for twenty-four productions. In 1963 Damiani's work for Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galilei (directed by Strehler) first achieved international fame. In doing so, he followed Brecht's intentions, showing theater not as an illusion machine, but as a conscious stage play, and showed a brightly lit stage as a space into which architectural models and house elements are pushed and represent the key data for the play. Damiani's stage for Carlo Goldoni's Le baruffe chiozzote also met with interest: another sky, alternating between day and night, Venetian house facades scarcely torn to the left and right, and a foggy, distant landscape on the horizon behind a tulle veil. Damiani achieved the special light through aluminum foil, onto which the direct light of the spotlights was directed, in order to then fill the stage with a diffuse deflection.

Damiani's design of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Seraglio (Directed by Strehler, conductor Zubin Mehta ) for the Salzburg Festival was even more famous and perceived by the public and critics as sensational : a glistening bright horizon closed off the room, on a thought of the Commedia dell'arte evoking wooden floor acted by the singers who stepped out of the action when singing numbers and appeared like silhouettes against the light background. Two-dimensional, painted elements were pushed in to the left and right, which briefly illustrated the respective scenes. This production was shown in Salzburg until 1975, in 1972 it was also released at La Scala in Milan, in the 1980s in Paris and in 2006 it was played at the Teatro Real in Madrid. This production marked the international breakthrough for both Strehler and Damiani.

Damiani's design of Mozart's Don Giovanni in 1967 at the Vienna State Opera (directed by Otto Schenk , conductor Josef Krips ) was similar in its stage design to Galilei , Baruffe and Entführung , taking up some of their elements and varying them . The sensational production, which was heavily controversial at the premiere - which was highly praised by the FAZ's Viennese cultural correspondent at the time , Hilde Spiel - said goodbye to all performance traditions: no Seville was on the left side due to the narrowing of the stage A portal enriched with a classicist quote, but rather northern Italian architectural elements that were alternately grouped in front of a horizon that once again provided a strong rear light. Except for the beginning, the piece no longer played in the night, but in the - sometimes brilliantly bright - day, including the cemetery scene of the second act. Damiani referred to the traditional backdrop stage, created normal-sized buildings close to the ramp, which were supplemented from front to back by gradually decreasing elements (especially in the street scenes). The renovations took place with the scene open and fully lit, with no curtain separating the stage and audience. As in Salzburg, the singers acted on a Commedia dell'arte wooden floor, and their costumes also echoed the characters in this form of theater. Mozart's and Da Ponte's opera, which was previously mostly designed as a dark drama, was told by Damiani as a grotesquely ironic Italian folk tale, the depths of which emerged all the more clearly through the setting. Damiani felt Mozart's skepticism towards authorities, so in the penultimate scene he showed the commander's statue as a gigantic Sicilian marionette whose right arm could be lifted by a clearly visible rope. Don Giovanni was encircled by a large red, violently waving curtain (the hellfire) that filled the background of the stage and finally lifted and let him fall into the open: the myth could not die. Photos of the stage designs for this production, which were shown at the State Opera until 1972, were published in the magazine Theater heute in July 1967.

At the end of the 1960s, Damiani von Strehler began to break away, with whom he would later only work sporadically: For example in 1966 for Cavalleria rusticana at La Scala in Milan (conductor Herbert von Karajan ); 1974 for a highly acclaimed production of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at the Piccolo Teatro, where all illusionism was avoided and the downfall of a family took place under a ceiling curtain with cherry leaves on a stage pulled into the auditorium; in the same year with Mozart's Die Zauberflöte at the Salzburg Festival (conductor Karajan); 1975 for Goldonis Il campiello at the same theater and 1978 in William Shakespeare's The Tempest .

Damiani often worked with the Italian director Luca Ronconi - Strehler's great antipode - with whom he brought out important productions: in 1975 for the first time at the Vienna Burgtheater in The Birds of Aristophanes and in 1976 in the Oresty of Aeschylus . In 1978 Ronconi and Damiani created an initially controversial, later much praised production of Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlos at La Scala in Milan, which portrayed the drama as a major state action, and where very precise scenographic elements were emphasized in front of a backhorizon that shone in changing colors. In 1980 they designed Verdi's Macbeth together at the Deutsche Oper Berlin (conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli ), which is now also available as a television recording on DVD. In working with Ronconi, Damiani has strayed a long way from the solutions developed for Strehler: abstract, geometrically accentuated buildings that defy temporal fixation predominate. The stage was interpreted as a continuously changing machine, for example at the Vienna Orestie , where even treadmills were used.

In the late 1970s, Damiani - who had already staged and furnished Verdi's Aida for the Arena di Verona in the early 1970s - began to work again as an opera director (including stage design and costumes), for example for Mozart's Idomeneo at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin - where he also directed Verdi's Luisa Miller , which was also shown in Paris - and later in Rome or in 1979 with Gioachino Rossini's Mosè at the Scala (conductor Claudio Abbado ). At the Teatro Regio in Parma he directed Verdi's Macbeth and Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (conductor Arnold Östman ) in 1987 . In addition, in 1982 he was given the opportunity to found his own theater in Rome: the Teatro di documenti , which he founded together with Ronconi and Sinopoli. There he presented his own productions (now also spoken theater for the first time): in 2006, for example, La Moscheta von Ruzante, Mandragola is planned for March .

Damiani only rarely took on stage design assignments from other theaters, for example in 1988 when he returned to the Burgtheater to furnish Friedrich Schiller's Wilhelm Tell for the director Claus Peymann : a cold, gray-blue illuminated, wintry room with gigantic rocks, which repeatedly lowered themselves threateningly from the Schnürboden, and a great wall, the destruction of which brought the Swiss the freedom they longed for. In 1996 he returned again as a stage to Salzburg, where he La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi endowed (Conductor Riccardo Muti , directed by Lluis Pasqual )

For years Damiani has campaigned for the rights of stage designers to be recognized as the authors of their works and to receive corresponding royalties for this. In 1963 the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna offered him to take over the stage design class as the successor to Caspar Neher . However, Damiani declined because he had doubts about his teaching qualifications and would rather consolidate the position of the set designer in Italy.

plant

Damiani is now counted among the most important stage designers in theater history. Decisive for this were the numerous innovations that Damiani introduced. The view of the set designer, who surrenders his drawings and leaves the execution to the theater staff, did not appeal to him, because he did not only want to see enlarged versions of drawings on the stage. Damiani wanted to get more involved in the realization of set designers and sought personal contact with stage painters and decorators. He was the first to deliver detailed drawings instead of rough sketches, which the workshops could then implement immediately. He also worked personally, for example in the painter's hall and in setting up the stage. At first this met with enormous resistance, initially at the Piccolo Teatro, but also at Scala, where the chefs responsible for the set felt duped. Especially at La Scala but also in Florence (in Der fierige Engel by Sergei Prokofjew in Strehler's direction), where people were still used to traditional backdrop painting, Damiani had a hard time at first and was only able to put his ideas into something less painted than actually built with great effort Enforce space. Today, Damiani's suspicious desire to control and help shape the execution of his work and to deliver precise detailed sketches is part of the everyday life of stage designers.

Damiani also introduced numerous innovations in stage lighting. For Le baruffe chiozzote , he installed the skylight in such a way that the spotlights shone on metal foils, the light being slightly refracted and diffusely illuminating the stage. This enabled him to mimic the quality of daylight. The first use of light sources that were previously unusual in the theater, such as fluorescent lamps , also represented a pioneering act that has long been standard today. In addition, Damiani's designs provided for precise lighting, with the concentrated use of top, back and side light, which made the three-dimensional spaces more visible. There were also precise ideas about the light color. Characteristic for Damiani's equipment were often bright horizons, in front of which different light and shadow zones were grouped. This made it possible to stand out the actors from the background, to make them appear like silhouettes from time to time and thus to allow new statements about the play and interpretation. Other stage designers such as Ezio Frigerio - who, together with Strehler, continued numerous suggestions by Damiani - or Robert Wilson continued to use these design elements and adapted them for their purposes.

When setting up a set, Damiani pursued the idea of ​​creating a space that was open on the left and closed on the right. A view should be possible on the left side, which should give the viewer the opportunity to enrich the room with their own imagination and to virtually complete it. Damiani also came up with the idea of ​​placing a piece in a specially designed portal through which one can look at the scene and was adopted by other set designers. Damiani was skeptical of the idea of ​​a traditional theater curtain that opens at the beginning and closes at the end. He often experimented with curtain-free set designers who are permanently accessible to the audience, and conversions when the scene is open.

As a costume designer, Damiani also abandoned the traditional path of just handing in the associated sketches to the tailor's shop. He was the first to photograph the actors from the front and the side in order to use these images to adapt the costumes to the actors' bodies.

The German set designer Karl-Ernst Herrmann named Damiani as the most important role model for his work.

Filmography (selection)

• 1966: Le baruffe chiozzotte (TV movie)
• 1967: The Abduction from the Seraglio (TV movie)
• 1968: Cavalleria rusticana (TV movie)
• 1972: The Man of La Mancha
• 1976: Macbeth (TV movie)
• 1987: Macbeth (TV movie)
• 1990: Wilhelm Tell (TV film)

Web links

• Luciano Damiani's autobiography in five parts with numerous drafts and photos (Italian)
• Homepage of Damiani's Teatro di documenti
• Homepage Piccolo Teatro: Archive page with photos of Damiani's sets