Vittoria Crespi Morbio

Four stagings that made history at La Scala: Simon Boccanegra by Verdi, 1971; Falstaff by Verdi, 1980; Lohengrin by Wagner, 1981; The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart, 1981. We owe them to Giorgio Strehler’s anxious genius, but they achieve their form and visibility thanks to the ‘absolute eye’ of Ezio Frigerio (Erba, Como, 1930): an eye that measures and controls space, regulates proportions, calibrates relations, and endows the stage with a poetic imagination begetting immortal icons, like Boccanegra’s sail. First costume designer, then scenographer, Frigerio worked for La Scala for over fifty years, signing an impressive number of productions for Strehler, Ronconi, Konchalovsky, Herzog, Nureyev, leaving the signature of an imagination poised between the abstraction of pure form and nostalgia for reality: a highly complex intellectual adventure, an emblem of greatness.