Pier Luigi Pizzi

Pier Luigi Pizzi ( born June 15, 1930 in Milan, Italy ) is an Italian stage designer, costume designer, and opera director.

Pier Luigi Pizzi studied architecture at the Milan Polytechnic. In 1951, he started against the will of his father initially skeptical in the environment of Giorgio Strehler and then at the Teatro Tommaseo in Genoa with his work in the theater, which soon brought him together with Giorgio De Lullo and his theater troupe Compagnia dei Giovani. Later he worked for years as a stage and costume designer primarily with director Luca Ronconi together, where he worked both in the theater as well as in the opera. 1977 debuted Pizzi at Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Turin as a director, what were joined numerous other opera productions, for which he also designed each stage and costumes. On opera stages Pizzi today works exclusively in personal union by the director, set and costume designer.

Pizzi worked at major theaters such as La Scala in Milan, the Vienna Burgtheater, the Vienna State Opera, the Paris Opera, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Arena di Verona and the opera houses in Florence, Naples, Palermo, Parma, Reggio Emilia or the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Numerous productions created Pizzi for the Rossini Opera Festival Pesaro, with whom he established a decades-long working relationship.

As a set designer Pizzi tends to designs that define the performance space exactly and include many built elements. The influence of his architectural studies is unmistakable. Usually it goes with him to areas that do not hide their artificiality and are often equipped with stairs, landings, etc., and mostly constant transformations are subject. Achieving a spatial illusion or theatrical realism he strives hardly ever, and if so, to counteract the respective performance traditions. Therefore Pizzi was in 1974 in Richard Wagner's Die Walküre (Director Ronconi, La Scala, Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch ) seemingly lifelike interiors of the nineteenth century, which were surrounded by a luxuriant nature and its artificial theatricality does not hid. Again and again he quotes in his works works of fine art, as also in 1974 in Giuseppe Verdi's La forza del destino at the Vienna State Opera (directed by Luigi Squarzina, conductor Riccardo Muti ), where he nachbaute parts of Francisco de Goya's Los desastres de la guerra and presented in the context of a traditional, often gathered curtain opera of the 19th century. For Ronconi 's production of The Bacchae at the Vienna Burgtheater in turn Pizzi referred to the ancient world, by making their rediscovery in the Italian Renaissance visible and brought parts of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza on the stage, broken by an equally from behind shown, constructed of wood proscenium arch.

As an opera director Pizzi is characterized by a non-ideological approach to the works of composers. He can approach the intentions of the authors strong and play filtered through his glasses which vision, on the other hand it can also tend to be ironic distortion or radical simplifications. Pizzi tends in the persons directed to hold back, he builds the singers rather in the stage and characterizes them by simple, mostly in color considerably accentuated and executed with contemporary materials Costumes, indicating their historicity only as a quotation.

Opened in 1990, Pizzi the newly built Opéra Bastille in Paris with his production of Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz. In December 2004, Pizzi designed sets and costumes for L' Europe riconosciuta by Antonio Salieri to the reopening of the renovated La Scala in Milan, where he after around twenty -year break for the first time with Luca Ronconi worked here and for once was only responsible for the equipment.

In October 2005, Pizzi was appointed artistic director of the opera festival in Macerata, where he was repeatedly served as director. This function it is to serve until 2007.

Pizzi is entered as an exhibition designer in appearance. Opened in 2004, the Museum of La Scala in Milan - the Museo teatrale alla Scala - with the designed Pizzi new facility.

Pizzi is a Knight of the French Legion of Honour.

Working

(Selection, unless otherwise indicated, Pizzi is responsible for directing, stage design and costumes)

• Maria Stuarda ( Gaetano Donizetti, directed by De Lullo, conductor Francesco Molinari - Pradelli, Maggio Musicale Florence 1967)
• Carmen (Georges Bizet, directed Ronconi, Arena di Verona 1970)
• The Bacchae ( Euripides, directed Ronconi, Vienna Burgtheater 1973)
• Die Walküre (Wagner, Director Ronconi conductor Sawallisch, La Scala in Milan 1974)
• Aida (Verdi, directed by De Lullo, conductor Claudio Abbado, La Scala 1974)
• La forza del destino (Verdi, directed Squarzina, conductor Riccardo Muti, Vienna State Opera, 1974)
• Così fan tutte (Mozart, directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, conductor Karl Böhm, Scala 1975)
• Don Giovanni (Mozart, Turin 1977)
• Les martyrs ( Donizetti, directed by Alberto Fassini, conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti, Venice 1978)
• Parisina ( Pietro Mascagni, conductor Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Rome 1978)
• Orlando furioso (Antonio Vivaldi, Claudio Scimone Conductor, Verona, 1978)
• Semiramide ( Rossini, conductor Jesús López Cobos, Aix -en- Provence, 1980, conductor Alberto Zedda, Teatro Margherita Teatro Regio Turin and Genoa, 1981)
• Ariodante ( Handel, conductor Alan Curtis, Milan Piccola Scala, 1981)
• Faust (Charles Gounod, Bavarian State Opera in Munich 1980)
• Tancredi ( Rossini, conductor Gelmetti, Pesaro 1982)
• L' assedio di Corinto ( Rossini, conductor Eliahu Inbal, Teatro Comunale Florence, 1982)
• Mosè in Egitto ( Rossini, conductor Claudio Scimone, Pesaro in 1983, 1985, Rome 1988)
• Les Indes Gallant (Jean -Philippe Rameau, conductor Philippe Herreweghe, Paris / Dijon / Venice, 1983)
• Hippolyte et Aricie ( Rameau, conductor John Eliot Gardiner, Aix -en- Provence in 1983, conductor William Christie, Paris 1985)
• L' Orfeo ( Claudio Monteverdi, Palazzo Pitti, Florence 1984)
• I Capuleti ei Montecchi ( Bellini, conductor Muti, Covent Garden London 1984)
• Rinaldo ( Handel, conductor Charles Frederick Farncombe, Reggio Emilia 1985, Paris Conductor Charles Mackerras )
• Nel Giorno di Santa Cecilia ( Festa teatrale Pizzi with music by Henry Purcell, conductor Charles Frederick Farncombe, Reggio Emilia, 1986)
• Bianca e Falliero ( Rossini, conductor Donato Renzetti, Pesaro 1986)
• Otello, ossia Il Moro di Venezia ( Rossini, conductor John Pritchard, Pesaro 1988, Chicago 1992)
• Don Carlo ( Verdi, conductor Claudio Abbado, Wiener Staatsoper, 1989)
• Les Troyens ( Berlioz, Myung Whun Chung Conductor, Paris 1990)
• Les Danaïdes ( Salieri, conductor Claudio Scimone, Ravenna 1990)
• Castor et Pollux ( Rameau, conductor Christie, Aix -en- Provence 1991)
• Aida ( Verdi, Arena di Verona 1999)
• L' Europe riconosciuta ( Salieri, directed Ronconi conductor Muti, La Scala in Milan 2004)
• La Gioconda ( Amilcare Ponchielli, Arena di Verona 2005)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream ( Benjamin Britten, conductor Ion Marin, Teatro Real Madrid 2006)