Luciano Damiani
Luciano Damiani (* July 14, 1923 in Bologna, † 20 June 2007) was an Italian stage and costume designer and director.
Life and the beginning of the career
Damian grew up as one of three sons of a post office in Bologna on the Bolognina district, one of his childhood friends was the later prominent operatic tenor Gianni Raimondi. Damiani was after elementary school students in the Istituto Tecnico first Guglielmo Marconi and acquired as a child in Fascist Italy by Mussolini's drawings and copies of Raphael, support for a visit to the Liceo artistico. Then he received a fellowship to attend near Lucca the Collegio Venturoli in Castelnuovo Garfagnana, as well as the Liceo means of the fascist state. In 1942 he was chosen by the state to complete a trip to the former German Empire, which led him to Villach, Vienna, Salzburg and Munich. Because of his studies there remained Damiani initially spared, to be drafted into military service. Later, when he still had to be a soldier, he owed it to the turmoil of the war near the end that he was spared participation in hostilities. However, he was arrested for belonging to the army of the Republic of Salò, accused of being a fascist, but acquitted. Finally, he was in 1946 admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in his native city of Bologna, where he was instructed by Giorgio Morandi. For an image, he was awarded the first prize, was elected student representatives, although two professors rejected him because of his alleged fascist past. Damiani's father could clarify the misunderstanding in a personal interview. For the University Theatre, he began at this time to design his first stage designs, among other pieces by Luigi Pirandello, Eugene O'Neill.
With Giorgio Fumi, he founded an agency that the design of movie posters devoted himself. From 1949 he headed the agency alone and with increasing success. At the same time he intensified the scenographic work in Bologna: the theater La Soffitta, the second after Milan's Piccolo Teatro Teatro Stabile of Italy, and at the Teatro Comunale. There he met the leaders of the Piccolo Teatro know, Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler, who saw his stage pictures. A few days later Damiani was invited by telegram of grass, to design the sets for the Home Staging to Strehler piece cammino sulle Acque Orio Vergani. At the same time he was commissioned by the Italian branch of the U.S. production company Metro -Goldwyn -Mayer to make cinema advertising, posters and newspaper ads for Quo Vadis, for which Damiani, was now married and, later considered the father of a son with a price.
International career as a stage and costume designer
Damian closed his Bolognese agency and moved to Milan, where he designed more sets for the Piccolo Teatro with wife Sara and son Davide. Also at the then existing small stage of La Scala in Milan, the Piccola Scala, he was active: 1955 Strehler's production of Domenico Cimarosa's opera Il matrimonio segreto (later shown as a guest performance in the whole of Europe ). His ideas could Damiani at Bertolazzis El nost Milan for the first time realized as fully as possible. Later, when the chaser e gli altri Platonov ( a version of Anton Chekhov's Platonov ), he designed the costumes for the first time. Between 1959 and 1963, Damiani designed the set for twenty-four productions. 1963 became Damianis work for Bertolt Brecht Life of Galileo (Director Strehler ) first international celebrity. He followed Brecht's intentions, was not an illusion theater machinery, but as a conscious platform game, and showed a brightly lit stage as a space to be pushed into the architecture models and houses elements and represent the key data for the piece. Similarly, on interest was Damianis stage for Carlo Goldoni's Le baruffe chiozzote: Another sky, alternating between day and night, left and right just scribed Venetian facades, on the horizon a foggy behind a tulle veil looming distant landscape. The spectacular light reached Damiani by aluminum foil to which the direct glare of the spotlight was directed to distracted diffuse to meet the stage afterwards.
Even more famous and perceived by audiences and critics as sensational 1965 Damianis design of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio (directed by Strehler, conductor Zubin Mehta ) for the Salzburg Festival: a dazzlingly bright horizon closed the room, on a thought to the commedia dell'arte evocative wooden floor acted singers, as it emerged from the events in vocal numbers and appeared against the light background as silhouettes. Left and right two-dimensional, painted elements were pushed in that illustrated the respective scenes scarce. By 1975, this production has been demonstrated in Salzburg, 1972, they also came out at La Scala, in the 1980s in Paris and in 2006 it was played at the Teatro Real in Madrid. Both chasers as well as Damiani meant this production the internatiolen breakthrough.
In its scenographic conception similar to Galileo, Baruffe and kidnapping, Taking up some of their elements, and this was varying Damianis design of Mozart's Don Giovanni in 1967 at the Vienna State Opera (directed by Otto Schenk, conductor Josef Krips ). The sensational at the premiere highly controversial staging - the Vienna of the former cultural correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Hilde Spiel, was praised to the skies - goodbye to all performance traditions: No Sevilla was strong narrowing by the stage, with on the left side to see a classic quote enriched portal, but northern Italian architectural elements that were grouped alternately in front of a back caring for strong back light horizon. The piece played to the beginning no longer at night, but on - sometimes bright light - day, even the graveyard scene of the second act. Damiani was referring to the traditional stage backdrop, created normal sized, ramp near buildings, which were supplemented from front to back of gradually decreasing elements ( especially in the street scenes). The conversions were carried out at an open stage and lighting, no curtain separating the stage and the audience. The singers acted as in Salzburg on a commedia dell'arte - board floor, and also their costumes showed hints of the character of this form of theater staff on. Mozart and Da Ponte's opera, which was previously mostly applied as a sombre drama, Damiani told as grotesquely ironic Italian folk tales, emerged whose depths the stronger by the equipment. Damiani felt Mozart's skepticism towards authority after, so he showed in the penultimate scene, the Komtursstatue as enlarged to gigantic Sicilian puppet, whose right arm was lifted by a clearly visible rope. Don Giovanni was filled by a the stage background, big red, violently waving curtain ( the Hellfire ) enclosed, who eventually rose and let him plunge into the open: the myth could not die. Photos of the stage designs of this production, which was shown at the State Opera until 1972, the magazine Theater today released in July 1967.
In the late 1960s began Damiani of chasers to solve, with whom he was to collaborate later only sporadically: for example, 1966 for Cavalleria rusticana at La Scala ( conductor Herbert von Karajan ); In 1974, a highly acclaimed production of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at the Piccolo Teatro, where any illusionism was shunned and took place under a ceiling curtain with cherry leaves the sinking of a family on a drawn into the auditorium stage; in the same year in Mozart's The Magic Flute at the Salzburg Festival (conductor Karajan ); Goldoni's Il Campiello 1975 at the same theater in 1978 with William Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Damiani often worked with the Italian director Luca Ronconi - the great antipodes Strehler - together with which he brought out significant productions: 1975 for the first time at the Vienna Burgtheater in The Birds of Aristophanes and 1976 in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. 1978 created Ronconi and Damiani an initially controversial, later acclaimed staging of Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlos at La Scala, which was the drama as a large state- action, and where very precise scenographic elements were emphasized in front of a gleaming in changing colors Rückhorizot. In 1980, she designed together Verdi's Macbeth at the Deutsche Oper Berlin (Conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli ), which is present now as a television recording on DVD. In working with Ronconi to Damiani has far from the developed solutions for chasers: It outweigh abstract, geometric accented buildings that are beyond temporal fixation. The stage was interpreted as a continuously transforming machine, such as the Wiener Oresteia, where even treadmills were used.
In the late 1970s Damiani started - already in the early 1970s Verdi's Aida for the Arena di Verona had staged and equipped - to be again even as an opera director ( each also sets and costumes ) works, such as Mozart's Idomeneo at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin - where he also staged Verdi's Luisa Miller, which was shown in Paris - and later in Rome or 1979 Gioachino Rossini Mosè at La Scala ( conductor Claudio Abbado ). At the Teatro Regio in Parma in 1987, he directed Verdi's Macbeth and Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (conductor Arnold Östman ). In addition, he received in 1982 in Rome the opportunity to create his own theater: the Teatro di documenti, which he founded together with Ronconi and Sinopoli. There he established his own productions before ( first time also spoken theater ): 2006 about La Moscheta of Ruzante, for March Mandragola is planned.
Stage orders other theaters took Damiani rarely true, about 1988, when he returned again to the Burgtheater to equip for the director Claus Peymann Friedrich Schiller's William Tell: a cold, gray - blue illuminated, winter room, with giant rocks, threatening the reduced lowered repeatedly from the fly loft, and a large wall, the destruction of the Swiss brought the longed-for freedom. In 1996 he returned again as a stage to Salzburg, where he La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi endowed (Conductor Riccardo Muti, directed by Lluis Pasqual )
Damiani has been used for years for the rights of the stage to be recognized as authors of their work and to receive appropriate royalties. 1963 offered him the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, to take over as successor to Caspar Neher the Stage class. However Damiani refused because he doubted his teaching certificate and would rather consolidate the position of the stage in Italy.
Work
Damiani is now counted among the most important stage designers of theater history. The decisive factor was the numerous innovations introduced Damiani. The view from the stage designer who gives his drawings and the execution leaves the theater staff told him not to because he enlarged on the stage not only in the dimensions wanted to see versions of drawings. Damiani wanted to be more involved in the realization of set designer and sought personal contact with painters and stage decoration farmers. He started the first detailed drawings deliver instead approximate sketches, which could then be converted directly from the workshops. He also worked with personally, as in the painting room and the setting up on stage. First, the same was enormous resistance, initially at the Piccolo Teatro, but also at La Scala, where the authorities responsible for the facilities boss felt duped. Especially at La Scala but also in Florence ( in The Fiery Angel by Sergei Prokofiev in Strehler's director), where traditional set design was used in each case, there Damiani was hard at first and could only with great difficulty, his ideas of a less painted, but rather actually built space prevail. Today Damianis counts then pursued with suspicion desire to control the execution of the work, and to help shape and deliver precise detail sketches of everyday life for stage designers.
In the stage lighting Damiani also led a number of innovations. For Le baruffe chiozzote he mounted the skylight so that the headlights shone on metal films, the light thus easily broken and diffusely lit up the stage. This enabled him to imitate the quality of natural light. The first use of the theater until then unusual light sources such as fluorescent lamps, represented a pioneering work that long is standard today. In addition, Damiani designs provided for a precise illumination, with concentrated use of upper -, negative - and side light more visible made the rooms in its three dimensions. There were also specific ideas about the color of light. Characteristic of Damiani equipment were often bright horizons, in which different light and shadow zones were grouped. Thus, it was possible to differentiate the actors from the background to let them occasionally as silhouettes appear and thus allow new statements to piece and interpretation. Other set designer Ezio Frigerio as - the continued numerous suggestions Damiani along with chasers - or Robert Wilson have these design elements continue to be used and adapted for their own purposes.
When building a stage set Damiani pursued the idea of making a left- open and right closed room. On the left, a view should be possible, should the spectator open the possibility, even to enrich the space with imagination and to complete it virtually. The idea to put a piece in a specially designed portal through which you look at the scene, comes from Damiani and was taken over by another set designers. The idea of a traditional theater curtain that opens and closes at the beginning of the end, Damiani was skeptical. He often experimented with curtain -less stage designers who constantly developing itself to the audience, and conversions at open scene.
As a costume designer Damiani also left the traditional way, only to give the corresponding sketches in the tailoring. He was the first photographed the performers from the front and from the side to adjust the basis of these images, the costumes the actors' bodies.
The German set designer Karl -Ernst Herrmann has called Damiani as the most important model for his work.