Meetings of life and theater where the only missing feeling is nostalgia

There is Valentina Cortese who arrives at Palma Ojetti’s funeral directly from Salzburg “without even changing: she was wearing the typical boiled wool suit with horn buttons, a badger tail on green felt and the classic embroidered silk apron. In short, she was in a Tyrolean costume ”and she“ obviously she could not give up her show ”by starting to talk to the deceased. There is Montserrat Caballé who arrives at the first rehearsal of the legendary “Semiramide” of Aix not knowing her part, and oh well, when she has never learned one, but above all after having gobbled up melons the night before. Result: hasty escape in search of a toilet, and “in the hall we were hit by the soundtrack of a fireworks display. It was the apocalyptic effect of the melons” (other reliable sources, however, tell us that the description of the accident was this: “A tsunami of m…”).

There is Angela Gheorghiu who, as usual, plants trouble and is kicked out of a “La Traviata” in Madrid with this sentence: “You don’t make the written notes because you don’t know them, you don’t make the unwritten ones because you don’t have them”. There is Paola Borboni who replies to Renato Rascel who had called her an “ugly old woman”: “Old yes, but I was young; ugly perhaps, but I was very beautiful. You, never high!”.

There is of course, and a lot, the Compagnia dei Giovani, Falk-Guarnieri-De Lullo-Valli, all genius, skill, triumphs, great tragedies and, sometimes, pettiness. There is a young Alberto Arbasino who cuts his wrists for an unhappy love but then replies “with more superficial cuts” for another him, and “we friends ironically tried to dissuade him from repeating the same gesture every time, otherwise we might as well have been installed a zip directly on the wrists”. There is Teresa Berganza, the famous Carmen who tells of her maid who listens to Caballé on TV, still her, sing the Habanera and screams indignantly: “Señora, la gorda canta lo suyo!”. In short, they are all there.

What a delight, this You can never rest easy, the “Meetings of life and theater” by Pier Luigi Pizziwritten for the EDT together with the young man Matthias Palma, who is on his way to becoming a Pizzi of music journalism. Pizzi is 93 years old enough to be the envy of a sixty-year-old, and has been in a career as a set designer, costume designer, director, artistic director, for 72: are not only his memories, but those of the Italian theater, and all, sung, spoken and danced. A delight from start to finish, of course, a whirlwind of people, personalities, vices, virtues, glories, miseries told with a sometimes affectionate and sometimes perfidious grace, by Saint-Simon (but more ironic) or by Cardinal de Retz (but less presumptuous).

Tutto Pizzi minute by minute and show by show, meetings, clashes, intellectual and amorous passions (even heterosexual), travel, exhibitions, monsters. He doesn’t speak ill of everyone, no. But many, yes. And of course we villains enjoy the most when ours demolishes someone en passant, with that distracted nonchalance that destroys. And then Visconti “took himself terribly seriously, with the aggravating circumstance of a total lack of irony”, Fellini was “cynical and a liar”, Zeffirelli had the problem “of competing with Visconti” (a very correct diagnosis, in the end: from here the serial accumulation), while Wanda Osiris, throwing roses sprinkled with Arpège in the audience, “sang (so to speak)”.

Rossella Falk marries a very rich industrialist, Rino Giori and moves with him to Switzerland. Here “she began to make fleas on the accounts of the servants, making enemies of everyone from the first day, but since she was rather incautious in receiving visits to the villa in the absence of her husband, revenge did not take long to arrive: she was immediately reported to Giori who threw her out of the house.” Naturally, the famous fur war between her and Cortese was not missing, at the rehearsals of a “Maria Stuarda” by Zeffirelli, when the divas arrived every day with more precious and longer garments, until “Valentina, with a great sense of humor , put an end to the competition by presenting himself with two fur coats one on top of the other, with fur hat and muff”.

It’s a life told in such a way as to make us envy those who lived it. Also because, in this cocktail of feelings, the only one Pizzi hasn’t shaken is nostalgia. At his age, keep looking forward, not back: and it is perhaps the most important lesson of this enchanted and enchanting book.