Music: Dali v. Scarlatti

Conductor Antal Dorati faced 17 musicians wearing 18th century breeches, periwigs and white silk hose. On a balcony overhead. Surrealist Artist Salvador Dali abruptly appeared in a Venetian gondolier’s outfit and a red Catalan cap, began splashing brown and gold paint on a canvas with such vehemence that he spattered the astonished audience below. With a flourish, he ripped the canvas open—and out flew a dozen frightened homing pigeons, to flap about looking wildly for their cote.

With this upsetting overture, the curtain in Venice’s handsome La Fenice theater rose one night last week for one of the wackiest premieres in operatic history. Presumably, the select group of invited critics and music lovers came with the expectation of hearing The Spanish Lady and The Roman Cavalier, a retitle for Alessandro Scarlatti’s long-forgotten comic opera, Scipio in Spain, composed in 1714. What they got was Scarlatti heavily laced with Salvador Dali, theatrical effects, erotic dancers and leering double-entendres.

Pianos, Beef & Milk. Commissioned two years ago to stage The Spanish Lady, Dali dived into the project with his usual manic genius. The rising curtain revealed a ghostly painted image of Dali, mustache tips rising to eyebrows, eyes piercing the audience. As the gauze tableau faded out, the heroine came on, her two-yard-long tresses supported by a red crutch. Presently she extracted a pie-sized Dalian watch from her bosom and bestowed it on her suitor. There were other visual distractions: a colored tableau showing a large violin walking on spindly legs and stretching an arm toward a piano gushing milk, a blind man sitting before a television set, a beef carcass hanging above the singers’ heads with a trumpet fixed horizontally over its rear, a procession of eight actors who dropped armfuls of china as a crashing accompaniment.

Through all this interference, Mezzo Soprano Fiorenza Cossotto and Bass Lorenzo Alvary—the opera’s entire singing cast—struggled to tell Scarlatti’s simple allegory of an aging Roman centurion’s efforts to win a Catalan coquette long after the decline of the Roman Empire had doomed to failure any such suit. The singers struggled against impossible odds. Three more curtain-size Dali tableaux fell, each full of the usual Dalian symbols: butterflies, breasts, limp watches and legions of crutches.

Wheelchair. Even then, the show was not over. The Spanish Lady was followed by a surrealistic ballet titled Gala (Greek for milk), set to Scarlatti music and also richly endowed with Dalian props. The announced theme was Woman, the supreme nourisher of mankind. Onto a darkened stage walked a figure pushing a wheelchair with a cripple holding a flashlight. Soon the stage was filled with other cripples who discarded their crutches, began plunging wire frames into seven barrels (filled with a liquid specially prepared by the French perfume house of Guerlain) to produce weird geometric bubbles. When the Woman (Ballerina Ludmilla Tcherina) appeared, she launched into some of the most erotic dancing since Minsky, in a black leotard so tight that she seemed more nude than nude. In the ballet’s climax, Tcherina emerged as the Supreme Mother, in a black and white gown with flesh-colored breasts. Her nourishing power was symbolized by a cascade of “milk”—liquid carbon dioxide from beneath the rafters.

To produce last week’s program, Bass Alvary formed his own company, hired all the talent. Said he of Spanish Lady, with a straight face: “Obviously I am speaking to people who think; the trouble with the conventional opera is that everything’s simple and sweet.” Italian critics (“For the good of this renowned theater, it is best that this is never repeated,” said Rome’s daily Il Messaggero) agreed that Alvary’s program was neither simple nor sweet.