That’s why Conte alla Scala can stay there

On last Saturday’s Sheet, Piero Maranghi lashed out against the Paolo Conte concert scheduled at La Scala on the 19th next coming. Not for Conte, who actually likes him, but for the Scala “profaned” by a chansonnier. Vittorio Sgarbi answered him yesterday, essentially saying that Conte alla Scala can sing because the public likes him, an aesthetic criterion that seems a bit television to me. Maranghi is a Milanese who is truly in love with La Scala and who knows what he’s saying, two characteristics that don’t always coincide. So his opinion is not only respectable, but authoritative. And yet the rhetoric of La Scala as a temple is not only wrong but dangerous.

First of all, because La Scala was not conceived to be a temple. Historically, we have always done everything and more: we danced, ate, drank, chatted, gambled, made love and got involved in politics. The very architecture of La Scala, like that of all Italian theaters, demonstrates that the first purpose for which it was built was not to see a show, but to pleasantly spend an evening there. The boxes, the abundance of foyers, foyers, cafes and various galleries served this purpose. The idea of ​​the theater as a temple was born much later: the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was inaugurated in 1876, when La Scala had existed for just under a century. Wagner’s room is truly the anti-Scala: it is used to see the opera and only for this, and in fact there is no ornament or any space for messing around (and the seats are deliberately very uncomfortable, so you don’t sleep). Toscanini was the son of the culture that conceived it, and he made the famous reforms that we know of, darkness in the hall, the orchestral “pit”, the ban on keeping hats for ladies and that of granting encores for singers, etc. But, precisely, it is an idea completely foreign to that of the Italian tradition, in which the theater is above all the place of sociability, a cross between the square, the living room and the casino (and sometimes the casino). And it is linked to a well-defined era and aesthetics. In fact, in times closer to us, the anti-historical re-proposition at La Scala of the Tuscanian model of the demiurge primus without equals did not end with a brilliant balance.

Naturally, no one wants to go back to playing cards in the boxes and I too get annoyed when I find myself surrounded by selfanti foreigners (without whom, however, one closes shop). But the real reason why speaking of La Scala as a temple is wrong is because it reiterates the self-referential and ultimately self-defeating idea that it is a kind of island of beauty and civilization surrounded by barbarians like a village of Asterix in reverse: as if the world out there was always a threat and never an opportunity. The boundaries between “cultured” and consumer music have always been blurred and will increasingly become so. In 1874 Johann Strauss came to play his waltzes at La Scala, and there was no more entertainment music of that time; in 2009, the ballet danced to Pink Floyd hits, and without anyone doing a pleat. Italian opera itself, in the end, is a pop that has made it. At La Scala, theater is or should be made, and theater for two and a half millennia has been nothing more than a comparison and reflection with the contemporary world. This does not mean that starting tomorrow everyone will be free, and La Scala will become a good container for all content: the only distinction should be artistic quality. The Vespri siciliani currently staged, translated, cut and ridiculously directed, “profaned” La Scala (and Verdi) much more than any Paolo Conte could do.