The Curse of the
Joyous Woman, Part II

La Gioconda translates as “the joyous woman.” There was nothing joyous about Renata Scotto when she sang the title role in 1979 at San Francisco Opera, co-starring with Luciano Pavarotti. Both were doing the work for the first time, and the production was to be telecast live with worldwide distribution via satellite — a first for an American opera performance. This was a big, big deal, and as a result every aspect of the production was crème de la crème. It was such a big deal that documentary footage was shot, with cameras capturing a lot of what was going on backstage.

I first met Scotto in the 1960s. Back then she was a pleasingly plump, bourgeois type of lady, with a voice ideally suited to light lyric repertoire like Gilda in Rigoletto and the title role of Lucia di Lammermoor. However, as Maria Callas got more and more famous, Scotto began to abandon the lighter roles in favour of the heavier repertoire that was Callas’s bread and butter. Some say it was a matter of Scotto trying to outdo Callas. Scotto even began to look the part, transforming herself physically by dressing more elegantly and slimming down. While she lost some weight, she didn’t gain any height; as you read on, you’ll discover that this is a salient point.

When Callas died in 1977 things seemed to get worse for Scotto. In death Maria had become deified, and her fans would not tolerate any criticism of their goddess. Around the time of our La Gioconda a television program about Maria aired, and it featured remarks from several leading sopranos. Each one of these very famous ladies offered nothing but heartfelt praise — except for Scotto. Callas’s fans could not have been more insulted, and since that incident they never passed up the opportunity to express their displeasure. This La Gioconda would provide them with just such an opportunity.

Problems started before we even began to rehearse. Scotto found out that Luciano was going to be three days late and, not to be outdone, she called to say that she was going to be four days late. As we started to rehearse, it quickly became clear that I was going to be less a stage director and more of a circus ringleader. By just opening my mouth I could provoke “No, I can’t do that!” from Scotto. She even refused to have a photo shoot with Pavarotti. “I don’t need to take pictures with Luciano since this opera is called La Gioconda and I am the protagonista, la sola protagonista.” We scheduled two separate shoots, but the newspapers made a composite of the two photos; Scotto and Pavarotti appeared together after all, with Luciano’s name in bigger type. You can imagine her reaction.

When doing a role for the first time, Luciano sometimes arrived without knowing it completely. Whenever he paused in rehearsal to refer to the score, Scotto would sweep off the stage, plunk herself down in a chair, and refuse to go on. “I am not going to rehearse in order to teach him his role,” she would say. To keep things going I had to walk the stage in her place. This happened so often that Luciano and I got quite used to each other as acting partners. Before starting the piano dress rehearsal I made a point of going to him and saying, “I know you haven’t seen that much of her, but remember: La Gioconda actually has hair.”

The television people thought that the opera would have to be trimmed in order to accommodate the broadcast, but Scotto rejected even the tiniest cut to her role. “Why don’t you cut something from Luciano?” became her constant refrain. The one who ended up bearing the brunt of this was baritone Norman Mittelmann. Every time he came to the stage part of his role was gone. On top of that, the minute he even looked as if he were thinking about maybe moving somewhere in her vicinity, she would bark, “Not too close! Not too close!” Scotto loathed having anyone stand next to her, or even within a sizable radius. She is a rather diminutive lady and my guess is that she hates being visually dominated.

This made staging the Act Three concertante a particular challenge: with many people singing at once, Scotto’s character is supposed to “overhear” Norman’s character. Logically this meant that he had to stand close to her. Illogically she insisted that he be on the other side of the stage. After a great deal of head-butting, I at least arranged for Norman to be the person to her immediate left, albeit standing a good twenty feet away. “Maybe Gioconda has abnormally good hearing,” was how I rationalized it dramatically. Ultimately Scotto subjected Norman to so many shouts of “Not too close” that one day he walked off the stage and nearly didn’t come back.

Contralto Margarita Lilova, who played La Cieca, the mother of Scotto’s character in this new production, fared no better. La Cieca, which literally means “the blind one,” is a pious, sightless woman and La Gioconda is supposed to guide her around the stage in a filial manner. But Scotto would have none of it. At one point everything came to a grinding halt as Scotto growled at Lilova to back away inch by inch. Finally I put my foot down: “Madame Scotto, if Madame Lilova takes one more step, she will be in the canal!” La Gioconda takes place in Venice, and Scotto had failed to realize that Lilova was teetering on the edge of the canal we had built into the set. “In performance we can’t very well have what is supposed to be a sightless woman looking around to make sure she doesn’t fall off the set, all because the person who is supposed to be her devoted daughter doesn’t want to be near her.” Scotto icily deigned to have Lilova stand within twenty feet of her.

Then there were the performances. General Director Kurt Herbert Adler had gotten wind of Scotto’s troubles with the Callas faithful so he had plainclothes security guards infiltrate the standing room area, ready to intervene if things got out of hand. The guards did pretty well in keeping things to a low rumble. However, they couldn’t prevent one brilliantly timed display of rancor. Scotto was singing “Suicidio,” an aria that ends on a low note requiring some richness — the kind of richness that Callas had in abundance. Unfortunately, Scotto’s attempt came out rather underpowered. When the aria ended there was a split-second of silence, and a Callas acolyte chose this moment to scream out, “Viva Callas!” The guards pounced immediately and escorted him out.

You would think that at least the intermissions would be easy, but you’d be wrong. The on-air host, Pia Lindström, daughter of Ingrid Bergman, conducted backstage interviews with Adler to cover what would otherwise be dead airtime. It was a good idea, but the cameras ended up catching a potentially disastrous episode. Act Two ends with a conflagration, and we had spared no expense in generating something grand and realistic. But it had resulted in a plume of smoke that filled the fly space. A sensor picked up the smoke, triggering the closure of the monstrous fire door at the back of the stage. The good news was that our safety systems worked. The bad news was that behind the freshly sealed fire door was our set for Act Three. This hadn’t happened during the dress rehearsal because we had used a smaller pyrotechnic effect. We had pumped it up for the television cameras, and now we faced the prospect of our internationally-televised opera coming to a screeching halt. With the cameras rolling there was no way we could afford even a modest delay, but the door refused to budge. The system was automated, and we didn’t know how to override or reset the switch. Adler, sitting in the wings about forty feet away, was blissfully unaware of any of this. He calmly chatted with Lindström while in the background you could see stagehands scrambling all over the place, pounding on the fire door, gesturing, and, presumably, cursing up a storm. Finally our head carpenter, Mike Cain, figured out that disabling the electrical current might enable the crew to open the door manually. Commando style, he shimmied up the wall to the top of the fire door and cut the wires. That did it. The crew rolled up the door and shifted the scenery with lightening speed.

By this point you might find yourself thinking, “Surely the curtain calls must have been uneventful.” But, again, you’d be wrong. We had agreed that no one would take a solo call until the final curtain, but Luciano got so excited after his aria “Cielo e mar” that he jumped in front of the curtain to acknowledge the tremendous applause — and to beam at the cameras. The documentary footage captured Scotto’s reaction: she was so furious that, after the final curtain, she refused to take a bow at all. It also captures me on my knees pleading with her, like something straight out of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. Still she refused. Her husband, also caught on film, began to egg her on: “Tell him what you really think. Tell him! TELL HIM!”

And she did, while I was still on my knees. “Questo teatro è la merda!” (“This theatre is shit!”)