The revival of the padano Falstaff

Discover the opera

"The structure is made of wood and metal. The bricks of the buildings are plastered, hand-carved polystyrene lined with Italian tulle and hand-painted with twenty coats of paint," says Leila Fteita over a cappuccino on a very cold Milan morning in December at the Armani Café, a refuge for the neighbourhood’s residents who appreciate its service, but above all its silence -- no eighties music to distract you and stifle conversation.

She explains that the tulle on the fourth wall is the only technical feature that can guarantee the "vibrant light" that Giorgio Strehler considered essential to bring his shows to life. The terracotta floor, part of Roman history, because how dare you leave the stage bare because "certainly no one from the stalls sees it." Perhaps even few from the boxes are paying attention, "but the singer obviously feels it," and so how could he "offer credible acting" without also being "in the story? ".

With her hands, she imitates the movements of a chisel and an awl, constantly scrolling through her smartphone to show references, inspirations, historical documents. In the famous production of Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff, directed by Strehler, which the theatre wanted to revive in January 2025 with Daniele Gatti on the podium, no one but her, longtime assistant to Ezio Frigerio, could have created the set.

She is doing this with a philological approach and a generosity that many would consider unusual for such a great artist, which Leila Fteita has become over the years: her CV and palmarès are on the Iulm university website, where she has been curating the set design and location management workshop for a decade, and it is quite impressive.

In 2022 she won the Abbiati Prize for the sets and costumes of Prokof'ev's Giocatore, conceived for the Festival della Valle d'Itria, and a few months ago the “Bacchus of the Bourbons” for the symbolically connected sets and costumes of the productions of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma and Nino Rota's Aladdin for the same festival.

Her Libyan diplomat father “who disappeared early” and she grew up in the Monferrato area where her mother reunited with her family after her early years of international travel and meetings. Fteita always knew that theatre would be her direction. She was unique in her family, it must be said, and perhaps for this, she is extremely tenacious.

"I met Frigerio at the funeral of Mauro Pagano, who was my first teacher. I had recently graduated from the Accademia Albertina in Turin.”

If she knows Strehler and Frigerio's desires, peculiarities, tastes and styles "by heart," it is because, before coming to La Scala in 1992 with the ballet La bottega fantastica, she worked with them at the Piccolo Teatro in Carlo Goldoni's Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, Luigi Pirandello's I giganti della montagna, Pierre de Marivaux's L'isola degli schiavi, and then at La Scala in Le Nozze di Figaro, with the "smeared rice mixture" wings that gave us the light "that you feel inside, in the space of the stage" that forever changed the history of Mozart's performance and of the theatre, not to mention, of course, the many revivals of Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff itself, which opened the 1980-1981 season under Lorin Maazel.

This production of Verdi's second and last work is so famous that it has its own patronymic, "the padano Falstaff". The last revival of the production, which transposes the adventures of the gay comedians from the court of Windsor to the farms of the lowlands gilded by the setting sun, took place in 2004 with Riccardo Muti at the podium.

"The props are all still there," says Fteita, referring to the Arcimboldi years, including the cart on which Strehler appears in a beautiful photograph, standing with open arms, pointing with gestures and movements to Natale De Carolis, who, in the December 7, 1980 performance, played Ford with all those fabulous alliterative epithets with "-ardo" against the villainous Falstaff ("sugliardo, scanfardo, scagnardo, falsardo").

There is the set, including the screen and the basket from the second act, but not the set, which was sent to the Bol'šoj Theatre for a series of performances some 20 years ago, when exchanges with Russia were not only possible but welcome, and remained there. It was given away, as so often happens in the history of theatres, when the "storage costs" of the item became unsustainable.

Seven editions of Strehler's direction had seemed enough. In 2013, La Scala also hosted a 1950s Falstaff conducted by Daniel Harding and directed by Robert Carsen, in which Falstaff embodied a decaying class compared to the new rich, played by Cajus and Ford, while Fenton had been appropriately transformed into a footman. It was an excellent edition, but 12 years later Padania felix won again, for a reason. Indeed, one cannot but agree with Strehler when he suggests that the revival of Shakespeare's Allegre comari di Windsor, in Boito's and Verdi's human journey, was born among the farms, or rather in that specific and unique architecture that is the Lombard courtyard, a nucleus of rural dwellings gathered around a courtyard - today we would call it a community - from which it draws its lifeblood.

Frigerio's Garter Inn, with the light filtering through the woven crosses and the characters coming and going against the light, looks more like a barn than a pub (the hay is real) or the elegant Windsor Hotel that takes its name from the play, but that doesn't make us spectators feel any less involved.

"I have the book that inspired Frigerio," says Fteita, still scrolling on her smartphone through a long series of pictures of Lombard farmhouses from an architecture book, presumably the famous one by Franco Presicci and Piero Orlando, also with those lovely warm, soft lights that pictures in architecture books had some 40 years ago.

Against the background of all this joy and the very prestigious list of craftsmen who, for months, have been flanking the "incomparable" Ansaldo Laboratories in this revival all over Italy, such as Arianese in Pero, Mekane in Rome, Silvano Santinelli in Pesaro and FM in Buccinasco, the debate remains open, of course, on the necessity or otherwise of recovering a historical layout and the validity or otherwise of such operations. Nostalgic and museum-like or, on the contrary, rightly philological?

Is it right to preserve the repertoire of the great masters and present them periodically, or should their gaze be crystallised in photographic and television images?

"I am in favour of preservation. The lessons of the masters must be made available to new generations," says Fteita. "It is up to us to educate.

It remains to be seen how "masters" will be distinguished as sets and costumes pile up in show after show. Fteita says she is certain that the beautiful things, the real innovations, leave their mark immediately.

In the mid-1980s, at the beginning of her career in the performing arts, she was part of the famous Turin-based avant-garde theatre groups Marcido Marcidorjs and Famosa Mimosa, founded by Daniela Del Cin and Maria Luisa Abate. Today, the Milan Triennale exhibits her early posters as works of art.

 

Fabiana Giacomotti
A specialist in French Literature, Fabiana has edited periodicals and newspapers, published essays in Italy and abroad, and founded a master’s program at La Sapienza University, where she taught for two decades. She writes for Il Foglio, where she edits the supplement “Il Foglio della Moda” and hosts a program for Rai Italia. She has also curated costume and fashion exhibitions for major Italian museums.
Translation by Alexa Ahern