MP How do you deal with such a composite material?
RC In fact, in any well-constructed drama we find plots and subplots that somehow come together coherently. In this play, there is, on the one hand, the main story of Queen Orontea, which follows the tradition of many characters of this period who exclude love from their lives, until of course they end up falling in love. Alcina also follows a similar path, with necessary differences since, in her case, magical abilities are missing. In general, this is a topos used in many theatre plots between the 16th and 18th centuries. On the other hand, however, there are many elements that have to do with typical Italian comedy: think of the character of the drunken servant Gelone or the identity game, in which a woman of a certain age, Aristea, falls in love with a man younger than her who is actually a woman in disguise, Ismero/Giacinta. These are repertoire plots from the commedia dell'arte, which then entered the Venetian opera tradition from which Orontea derives. But it is hard not to think of Shakespeare as well, for the continuous combination of serious and comic elements.

MP In Cicognini's libretto, we read at the beginning of the third act: 'The court is upside down', 'The queen has gone mad'. In short, the arrival of Alidoro completely upsets the ubi consistam of all the characters.
RC Wherever he goes, Alidoro leaves behind a trail of broken hearts. He is a sort of cross between Casanova and Don Juan, who gets carelessly involved with the women he leaves behind. He is not interested in past encounters, only those yet to come. I think it is partly related to the fact that he is a painter and his subjects are women, so he is always looking for new inspiration. Orontea also falls in love, but Alidoro is not of the social status considered suitable for a queen, until the finale, with a typical scene of anagnorisis, in this case of a pendant -- this rather common device was used by Oscar Wilde two centuries later -- it is discovered that the painter actually has a high social position but had been kidnapped by pirates as a child. All this takes time to recount: the work is long, but it has great drive, which explains the success it had in the 17th century, before it was forgotten.

MP Speaking of painting, one of the opera's memorable scenes is that of the portrait that Alidoro paints of Silandra. How do you interpret this incursion of art on stage?
RC Opera by definition combines all the arts: as we know, in Latin, the word is the plural of opus. This obviously includes music and theatre, but also painting and architecture, as well as choreography, and more recently film. So, painting in general in opera is always there, but as a director, you actually have to question the fact that you put a painter at the forefront. Talking about this with set designer Gideon Davey, we thought of giving a lot of space to art in our staging. After all, Milan has always been an important centre for art, and this gives us a way to make the story current, finding parallels between that era and ours that I hope will resonate with the audience, bearing in mind that most of them have probably never heard Cesti's Orontea. But there is something more in the fact that the main character is a painter and that all the women fall in love with him. No doubt it has something to do with the fact that Alidoro is handsome and that there has to be a sexual attraction, but it is not enough of an explanation. It is something to do with what he does: on the one hand, the painter projects something onto his subject; on the other, it is the subject, hence the women portrayed at that moment, who project something onto the painter, in a kind of psychoanalytic transference. Alidoro is what the French call a voyou , or a bohemian we might say, a rather negative character, or at least with anti-heroic behaviour, selfish and vain, lacking true morality. The figure of Caravaggio comes to mind, who, who knows, might even have been a model.

MP How would you describe Orontea's path?
RC Orontea is a woman who suddenly experiences her first love. No matter what age one is, first love is always first love, whether it is the very young Juliet or a woman with more maturity and experience. Orontea experiences the contrast between duty and love, between rationality and irrationality. It is ironic that the play begins with her counsellor urging her to take a husband and then, when she finally finds someone she wants to marry, she is told that it is no good, until it turns out that she has a suitable social position instead.

MP This is not the first time you have worked on a piece from that period.
RC I have staged all three of Monteverdi's operas: twice L'incoronazione di Poppea recently in Florence, and Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria and Orfeo in Lausanne. When I was young, one of my very first pieces was Cavalli's La Calisto , with a semi-professional company in England.

MP In these operas, the virtuosic element in recitatives and arias is almost completely missing, as it was to be found in the late baroque. Are we perhaps closer to spoken theatre?
RC It is true that the arioso line of the operas of this period require special commitment. Giovanni Antonini, with whom I have worked several times, has a lot of experience in the search for a vocal style that is always lively. In Vienna we did together what is perhaps the first opera in history, Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo by Cavalieri, staged in 1600, seven years before Monteverdi's Orfeo, which is usually considered the first opera. On that occasion, Antonini constantly reminded the singers not to dig too much into their voices, so as not to overload them and always to maintain expressiveness and lightness. However, we are in a musical theatre context: the music and the singing necessarily increase the emotional content. Of course, there is not the virtuosic element that Händel would later have, but even then, the incredible vocal brilliance is always linked to the characterisation of the characters: they are dramatic fireworks. In every opera there is always a dramatic purpose. For me, they are all theatrical works, with characters and a story that the audience has to follow. We have to work on the combination of the more concrete element of the plot, with its thrust, and the more abstract and emotional element of the music.

MP How do you work on the formal freedom of this work?
RC It often happened that the composers of the time, revisiting their work, cut characters, moved scenes from one act to another, and added music composed by them or even by others. In our case, the performance necessarily requires some adjustments, because each scene ends with the last note sung and the next one begins again immediately with the first note, but in many cases Cesti himself requires scene changes. It is clear that music must be added to achieve this. Perhaps something is repeated that has already been heard, or something is played that will not be heard at all. Antonini is well aware of these needs. We are not recording the opera, we are staging it, so we have to make it work. For example, we decided to cut the prologue, in which Love and Philosophy appear. I usually love the prologues of early baroque operas, but here we needed to get right into the action, because our staging will be realistic, not symbolic.

MP I would like to ask you for one last comment on the sexual freedom that can be found in the works of this period, which is sometimes even more explicit than in the 18th century libertines.
RC I have just staged La clemenza di Tito in Salzburg, in which two of the six main characters are men played by women, Annio and Sesto, and I thought that in 2024 there is no reason why they should not really be two women, perhaps in love with other women as in Mozart's opera. And we realised that it works very well. In Orontea, too, there are all kinds of gender identities: there is a male role sung by a woman, there is a woman disguised as a man, then there is Alidoro's mother (who is not actually his mother, as it turns out) who in the past could have been played by either a man or a woman. In the latter case, we have chosen a woman as the interpreter: in 17th century plays, the choice to give the part to a man was part of the comic strategies of Venetian comedy, which would not be acceptable to us today. In theatre, we do not want to find ourselves laughing at people, we are not doing 'theatre of cruelty' à la Artaud. This is a play that celebrates passion, where there is something in the air that excites all the characters. And that is what we want to portray.

Mattia Palma
Translation by Alexa Ahern