Long Ago in Spoleto: signature sketches at the Festival of Two Worlds (2)

July 9, 2021 News, Offerte, Visore Home No comments

On the occasion of Spoleto ’64, the column “Long Ago in Spoleto” wants to pay homage, for the second time in a row, to the genius and creativity of great set and costume designers who have been protagonists of the history of the Festival of Two Worlds. It does so by means of a small visual reconnaissance that certainly does not claim to be exhaustive and that is proposed as a brief anthology of typographical reproductions, made for programmes and catalogues, of sketches of sets and costumes, taken from memorable performances of the Festival. All the material, currently being reordered, is kept in the photographic section of the “G. Carducci” City Library.

As in the previous week, the names we are presenting represent a sort of gotha of set and costume design. We begin with a personality who, without fear of contradiction, was one of the greatest of all time, for rigour and visionarity: Piero Tosi.

Especially in cinema, with Fellini, Zeffirelli, De Sica, Pasolini, but especially with Visconti, Tosi was able to masterfully combine a love of detail and historical correspondence with a rare ability to use costumes not only for external representation, but to make them a true extension of the characters, a privileged means of expressing their inner life. It was while accompanying Visconti that Tosi invented the costumes (to which the reproduction of the sketch we present here refers) for a memorable “Macbeth”, the opera that opened the first Festival of Two Worlds in 1958. Tosi and Visconti would work together again for the Spoleto Festival in 1963 with “La Traviata” and in 1973 with “Manon Lescot”.

Having already made a name for herself as an illustrator for Vogue, Lila de Nobili was one of the most refined and elegant interpreters of set and costume design, from the late 1940s to the 1960s, building lasting partnerships, especially with Visconti, Zeffirelli and Rouleau. He designed the costumes for Rouleau’s “Arlesienne” in 1958 in Spoleto. The splendid sketch reproduced here refers instead to the 1960 “Bohème” directed in Spoleto by Menotti. He would return to the Festival several times, for example in 1973, when he designed the sets for Visconti’s “Manon Lescaut”, on whose costumes, as mentioned above, Tosi also collaborated.

Lila de Nobili’s assistant was Claudie Gastine who enjoyed one of her first international successes as costume designer for Donizetti’s “Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo” at the 1967 Spoleto Festival. Gastine’s sketch that we are proposing here was made for “Cenerentola” in 1978, a show directed by Jean-Marie Simon that had premiered the previous year at the Lyon Opera. Gastine would collaborate with Menotti as director for the costumes of both “Nozze di Figaro” in 1990 and “Onegin” in 1996.

Another student of Lila De Nobili’s teaching was Pierluigi Samaritani. Samaritani’s sketches refer to the sumptuous production of ‘The Tales of Hoffman’ for the Spoleto Festival in 1989, for which he was responsible for the direction, sets and costumes. Much of Samaritani’s dense curriculum has to do with Spoleto and its Festival, since 1968 when he took care of the sets and costumes of “Tristan and Isolde” directed by Menotti, whose sets and costumes he was very fond of working on (“La Medium” in 1969, “Don Pasquale” in 1975, “Maria Golovin” in 1977, “Parsifal” in 1987, “The Master Singers of Nuremberg” in 1992). Before “Racconti di Hoffman”, he was responsible for the sets and direction of “Sonnambula” in Spoleto ’79.

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