Ronconi. The Scala Years
by Vittoria Crespi Morbio. Essays by Cesare Mazzonis (Reflections on recollections); Angelo Foletto (Luca Ronconi, the Scala Salon. Agony and ecstasy of drama with music); Vittoria Crespi Morbio (A magnificent sleight of hand). Chronology of the productions by Andrea Vitalini. Collection «December Seventh». Amici della Scala – Grafiche Step Editrice, Parma, 2016. Italian – English edition, pp. 217.
For over thirty years starting with a historic Valkyrie in 1974, Luca Ronconi (1933-2015) was bound to the Teatro alla Scala by a series of unforgettable, epoch-making performances. Ronconi tackled every repertory: the baroque, classicism and Italian opera, Wagner and Strauss, Stockhausen’s contemporaneousness. Delving into the texts he drew from them creativity, the urge to experiment, imaginary forms, playfulness. His famous machines brought a new concept of onstage time and space, an extraordinary capacity to ‘look beyond’ tradition, a sense of the theatre as driving force and adventure. A year after the director’s demise, this book through its texts and images follows a creative cycle that we cannot consider closed.