The Florentine stage director Silvia Paoli has imagined a terrible setting for “Lucrezia Borgia”. He has moved his action from elegant Renaissance salons to a slaughterhouse and to fascist Italy. Paoli wants the audience to squirm in their seats and admits that she likes to make you uncomfortable. He has turned the story of the perfidious Ferrara, the daughter of Pope Borgia, and in his production he has tried to show her more as she supposedly was in reality than as Victor Hugo and Donizetti imagined her: more victim than executioner. “Lucrezia Borgia”, the fourth title of this season of opera in Oviedo, will premiere at Campoamor on December 7, at 7.30 pm.
–He has already presented his “Lucrezia Borgia” in Tenerife. How did the audience react to the scenery?
-It’s very shocking and there was a bit of a response. I have transferred “Lucrezia Borgia” to the years of fascism in Italy. It is a time that can very well explain the meaning of this work, which deals with a woman in a man’s world. She is the only woman – until the end in which the Negroni appears, who gives that party where they all fall poisoned. They are gentle, kind women, the way a woman should be, and all that reminds me a lot of fascism: men’s values are important, women have to accommodate what they say. Lucrezia Borgia was used as an object, as a means to obtain political gain and alliances with France, with Spain… She was married three times and the first time she was 13 years old. In the true story he never poisoned anyone; the brother … thinking of him Machiavelli wrote “The Prince”, he was diabolical. Lucrezia was always a pawn. And the character of the duke? He was a sadist, who took pleasure in the pain of others, and that is very fascist.
– Your aesthetic references?
-I was inspired by Pasolini’s film “The 120 Days of Sodom”, very hard, about fascism and the evil that is enclosed in that ideology. In my opinion, the fascist period is very close to the Renaissance period where the true story of Lucrezia unfolds.
– You say they are similar historical moments?
Yes, and if you want to send a message it is important to bring the story closer to the public. Keeping your distance is the easy part. I want to bother. For me, going to the theater is getting emotional, going out saying: I liked it, I didn’t like it, it was my turn, why, what have I learned from this story. It is not just looking at something beautiful. Of course there has to be beauty, an aesthetic, but the most important thing for me is the message. When we do theater we are always doing politics, because politics is society. I’m not interested in making art without a message. There are directors who do more aesthetic things and I like historical shows –which need a lot of money to do them well–, but I want you to give me your point of view. That’s what interests me.
– You are talking about recreating the works, in a literal sense.
–The repertoire works are always the same, and it is difficult to do different things each time. It is important to represent different works, there are a lot that we never do. The public asks for “La Traviata”, “Rigoletto”, but they can get used to different titles. So more can be done. You have to make the repertoire broader. It’s difficult to do new things, create new things if you don’t change the repertoire, so you have to look for less performed operas. If you don’t end up inventing things that don’t make sense. Everyone wants new things, but if the material is always the same, there comes a point where you have to stop inventing, you cannot do without the script. This is not the case, because “Lucrezia Borgia” has not been very represented.
–In the beginning, “Lucrezia Borgia” is a misogynistic opera…
-Yes, super misogynist.
– But in this production, with the staging and the approach that the singers make to the characters, it seems the opposite.
– I wanted to show that she was a victim of a society that always used violence to obtain things. If since you were a child you are used to using violence, you use violence, but it will not be your fault. She had an unknown son, who may have been the son of her father or her brother. She was raped as a child, that’s in the chronicles of the time. It is something that has impacted me a lot, as a woman, and we also have to tell this side of the story. That son is the only hope she has of loving, and in the end she managed to bring him with her to Ferrara. She was a very intelligent woman, with a great culture, she had a platonic love story with Bembo, a poet of the time, an interesting cultural circle. She was not only the poisoner of history but in the chronicles of her time she is cited as “the whore of Italy”. Lucrezia Borgia was an incredible mother, companion, and devoted wife. I don’t know why it has gone down in history like this, and I wanted to do it a bit of justice.
–Everyone who participates in the production –you, the singers… – seems to have fallen in love with the character of Lucrezia.
-Yes, totally. She is a victim that they take to the slaughterhouse. And that is the set, a slaughterhouse because in the end the story told by the opera is a carnage, six people die, she and her son. It is a psychological space. That is the story of “Lucrezia Borgia”, the story of a victim.
–The singers say that, despite the distance and the security measures that must be maintained on stage due to the covid, you have managed to maintain the tension and the feeling of the work.
“It’s cold, everything is cold, so the distance is fine.” I feel that we have to put the mask on the extras, the choir, that is inevitable, but with the movement and the scene, especially in the second act, we have managed to create that feeling of cold, especially between her and her husband, who They almost never touch, and with the son, because she does not know how to touch her son, who when she finds him is a man. This production has helped me to learn a new language, bringing to the scene a sanitary restriction and taking advantage of it.
“Will they take her to Bologna?”
Yes, in May.
–And how do you think your compatriots will react when they see this opera set in their fascist past?
-It will be uncomfortable. I think that in Bologna there will be a very harsh reaction, but I am also happy when they boo me. Not everyone, of course, that some do: “Buuuú” and others: “Bravo.” The important thing is that something happens, that it is not indifferent. For me, doing a show is removing something from the audience.
-It is his first time in Campoamor.
-Yes. What a taste! I love the theater and I love the team, they are incredible, I have worked super well.
-The theater is too small for some productions.
–For me it was small, but human effort is the most important thing. I have never found a professional team in Italy with so much enthusiasm. I hope that something can be done to modernize the theater, they have to make an effort. They need a revolution to get more modern things. With the new security legislation, it is starting to get old. They have to give you money to restructure it. It is a theater that works very well, and full of wonderful people who need things to work at their level.
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