The Luisotti era is about to begin. Four years after the maestro made his debut in the War Memorial Opera House conducting La forza del destino, to rave reviews, he assumes his new post as music director of San Francisco Opera.
It is fair to say that Nicola Luisotti, 47, has the music of Italian opera in his blood. He was born in the Tuscan seaside resort of Viareggio, in a region where Puccini worked for many seasons, and the site of the Torre del Lago Puccini Festival. His grandfather went duck hunting with Puccini in a boat on Lake Massaciuccoli. The relationship is reflected in one of Puccini’s most frequently performed operas. As Maestro Luisotti told the publication Corriere a few years ago, “And to Bergeggia, in Lucchesia, where my family was, Puccini came always to hear the playing of the [church] bells. I later learned from his letters that he got the inspiration of the bells in Tosca from hearing them when he stayed with us.”
As a child, Luisotti began studying music with a local priest. By age 11, he was directing the choir and playing the organ in the village church. Although he dreamed of studying with the renowned organist Fernando Germani in Rome, his father discovered that sending him there would cost his entire monthly salary. So young Nicola continued his free schooling at the seminary in Lucca and later attended the conservatory there. He continues to play organ, and is currently installing one in the home in Tuscany that he shares with his wife and childhood sweetheart, Rita.
In 1997, Luisotti decided to devote himself to conducting and quickly found success. After he led a 2001 Trovatore in Stuttgart, word of him spread. His uncommon ability to make operatic classics sound as if they were freshly composed led quickly to debuts in many of the world’s leading houses. He has also conducted a number of major orchestras, programming everything from Dvořák’s Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic to Kodály, Bloch, and Brahms with San Francisco Symphony last spring. If funds materialize, he hopes to conduct all-orchestral concerts with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra.
Thoughts on Conducting
At the start of an hour-long, in-person chat at the War Memorial, just two days after he and his wife arrived in San Francisco, Luisotti revealed his approach to coaxing the best from singers. Even though he says his English is "getting better each day," he brought along his charming assistant, Valentina Simi, to occasionally help with vocabulary. “First of all,” he said, “in my opinion, every conductor has to respect the others. When I work with Juan Pons or Angela Gheorghiu or Ramón Vargas or Renée Fleming — when you work with these kinds of singers, they have deeply the idea of what to do musically, and in the voice, of course. I think that they expect from you something more than they are. Singers think, ‘Now he will tell me something that will improve me in some way.’
“Sometimes, if you say too much, they will be confused. Sometimes, if you say nothing, but look at them in a particular way that I can’t express to you, they will change something.
“The conductor should not be the person who commands the people. The conductor must inspire people. This is our duty: to inspire people through the score, through the music that is not written, unfortunately, by us.
“The reaction that the singers have is sometimes extraordinary, because they are able to move themselves forward because I am moving forward. If they feel that I’m there, not to force them to do something, but to inspire them, they will give me their love, and I will give my love back to them.
“It’s like a relationship between two people who love each other. If you say, ‘This is mine,’ they will say, ‘This is mine!’ And what you have is something that is not complete.”
Realizing that people mirror each other’s behavior, Luisotti mirrors what he wishes to receive from the artists he works with. Exactly how he does that he can’t describe in words. “I think this is a mystery that happens between singers and conductor, between orchestra and conductor, chorus and conductor,” he says. “It’s a mystery. I don’t know.”
Enhancing the Repertoire
Nicola Luisotti’s choice of repertoire for San Francisco Opera — he will conduct productions of Il trovatore, Salome, Otello, and La fanciulla del West this season — not only reflects his Italian roots, but also reveals his musical preferences. As he explained toward the end of our chat, “I am Italian. [If I am to commission a new work], I’d like to commission an opera with an Italian composer, with an Italian librettist, and bring this big project to San Francisco, because San Francisco has a big Italian tradition, and America is a great place to do new operas of the Italian repertoire.”The subject of conducting new work is especially important to him, given a San Francisco Opera season in which the most recently written works are two by Puccini: La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), which Toscanini premiered at the Metropolitan Opera 99 years ago, and Il trittico, which premiered eight years later, also at the Met.
In an interview with Dominic McHugh, available online at MusicalCriticism.com, Luisotti makes clear his attraction to works that he considers “beautiful.” He contrasts the music of Puccini, which he considers to be in the grand tradition of Italian composers Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi, with that of what he calls the destroyer of that tradition, Schoenberg.
“The problem,” says Luisotti, “is that Schoenberg created this theory that everybody was very interested in, and they all read it and thought it was wonderful. It destroyed the meaning of the music. When you go to the theater and see Don Giovanni, or Bohème, or Rosenkavalier, it makes you feel warm inside ..., but when you see [Schoenberg’s set of 21 songs] Pierrot lunaire, you say, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’
“The problem is that in order to express itself, music needs beauty. ... We go to a gallery and stand in front of a Van Gogh or a Cezanne or a Michelangelo to see that beauty exists. People go to the theater to watch Shakespeare or Ibsen or Pirandello, or to the opera house to hear Mozart, Verdi, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Strauss, Weber, and they say, ‘OK, beauty exists.’ [The theater is] where you forget about life for a time; you forget about the past, present, and future. But if you go to the theater and see something interesting, it’s too much like life: The everyday is interesting, but it’s not beautiful.”
Hence, while we can expect to see more world premieres in the War Memorial Opera House — after all, David Gockley is now in charge — new works will likely be conducted by someone other than Luisotti. An exception would be the work he hopes to commission from Marco Tutino (b. 1954), a composer who co-spearheaded an Italian neoromantic group in the late 1970s.
Tutino currently serves as intendant (or general director) and artistic director of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna. The most recent of his 14 or 15 operas is based on Visconti’s movie Senso. Although Luisotti prefers not to discuss the potential opera’s subject matter, it is very much “in the tradition.”
God and Music
Over and over, in our discussion and others that Luisotti has participated in, the spiritual aspects of music come to the fore.“Singers are called, not to show themselves,” he says. “Me, I’m called not to show myself. We are called all together to show the music, to show the history, to show the composer, to show God. And God is the music for me. I’m a servant of the music, and singers must be servants of the music. Together, we have to serve.
“I believe in [doing] my small part in the music of the others that I wasn’t able, unfortunately, to write. I don’t like to work with prima donnas. I like to work with wonderful artists that dedicate their lives to serve the composers. The kind of artists who just like to show themselves will live in history just as examples of their taste, not of the music.”
Then again, the maestro does work with the likes of Angela Gheorghiu, whom he conducted both here and on a “Live From the Met” DVD of La bohème, available from EMI Classics. Perhaps the words “God” and “Diva” have their roots in a common divinity.
“I have a theory,” responds Luisotti, whose gift for mirroring the best in people clearly enables him to transcend the whims of artistic temperament. “You know, the Gospel of John says, ‘In the beginning was the word.’ Scientists say, ‘In the beginning was the big bang.’ Big bang/word/big bang/word. It means the sound. They are telling the same to us. In the beginning was the sound.”
He bangs on the table. “Beginning of the universe.” He bangs out a rhythm that sounds African in origin. “It’s an immediate sensation of music and rhythm. I’m sure the first explosion of the universe, the first voice of God, wasn’t just one sound on one level. From the lowest sound to the highest note, it was God speaking. And God used the music to speak to us for this reason.
“Today, when the music plays, we are confused. We can’t react against the music. We don’t know how to react. You can’t talk with the music; the music just talks with you. Or you participate with the music as a musician or singer.
“Even when you are a conductor, the music isn’t me. I’m not conducting the music. It’s the music that is conducting me. The musician is not playing; the music is using the musician to play.”
As Luisotti continues, his sincerity makes clear the depth of his devotion.
“You can’t become a musician at 40,” he says. “You become [a] musician when you’re born. Immediately. The music has already chosen you.
“I remember when I was young and growing up, suddenly the music discovered me. It said, ‘I’m here?’ I asked, ‘What is this?’ I was crying when I was listening to some music. Why? There must be a reason. Because the music chose somebody. I think it is God who chooses somebody and says, ‘OK, do the music.’ Not for me, for Him. And you are condemned, in a good way. You start to do this work that will follow you for your whole life. It is impossible to stop. It is a kind of drug. An incredible, beautiful drug that puts you close to God. But you can’t see God. You just can feel it.”
What San Francisco Can Expect From Luisotti
There is a an adage in journalism that quotes are best broken up with facts and commentary, and that the author of a feature article should end the piece in her or his own words . But there are times when it is best to jettison the rules, and allow an artist as impassioned as Luisotti to have the final say without interruption.So, getting out of the way, “I would like to fill people with this incredible experience that is the music,” he says in summation. “Nobody knows what my conclusions will bring. The operas I will conduct this season have been played many, many times since the first performances. But, for me, every time I put the score in front of my eyes on the piano, there is something to discover. I am sure for the public there will be something new to discover again. Otherwise, there is no reason to repeat and repeat and repeat again these masterworks. Every public that comes to San Francisco will come to enjoy the music like the first time.
“What I usually want to achieve when conducting opera and symphonic repertoire is to achieve the composer. But not by just going inside of the composer, Giuseppe Verdi or Richard Strauss or Puccini.
“Composers exist because they have written the music, but they don’t exist because the music is not written by them. Of course, we have a name. We have Giacomo Puccini, we have Giuseppe Verdi. We honor and adore them. But the achievement of human beings [is cumulative].” He waves his hands as though conjuring a melting pot of history. “Pergolesi. Monteverdi. Rossini. Mozart. You know, the achievement of the human being. So they had many thousands, millions of people [behind them].
“That force of people I call the hand of God. One hand, Mozart. Another hand, Strauss. What I’m trying to put into evidence is how these millions of people whose influence comes together in this one man named Strauss gave him the opportunity to express the voice of God.
“The music is an experience for everyone. When you go in [a] theater, and there are 2,000 or 3,000 [people] listening and watching the music — because you can watch the music, musicians, movement — all the world can be in that theater. All the races, all the colors of the human beings will talk personally with God. It’s not with a white beard or whatever. It is God.”