La Scala to stage opera of 'An Inconvenient Truth'
Friday, 30 May 2008
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It began life as a slide show before mutating into a prize-winning documentary and a book, but now An Inconvenient Truth, the work for which the former US vice-president Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, is to become an opera.
Subtitled The Global Emergence of Planetary Warming, the documentary film intertwines Mr Gore's personal discovery of the issue of global warming with his presentation of the hazards it brings. The film has become the fourth most successful documentary in the US, after Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins and Sicko, earning $49m (£25m) at the box office worldwide.
This week, Stéphane Lissner, the director of Milan's La Scala opera house, announced that the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli is to turn it into an opera, which will debut in Milan in 2011.
Battistelli, who is the artistic director of Verona's Arena Foundation, is a prolific composer of operas who has turned to works by Shakespeare (Richard III), Jules Verne, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Pasolini (Theorem) for inspiration.
Lissner was brought in to run the Scala three years ago when Italy's premier opera house was in the doldrums after the departure of the tempestuous director Riccardo Muti, who had dominated it for nearly 20 years. He has succeeded in turning the theatre around, dramatically expanding both repertory and audience, offering a rich array of works from lavish productions of popular works – such as Aida, produced by Franco Zeffirelli – to challenging new operas.
This week, for example, he announced that the 29-hour-long opera cycle Light by the notoriously difficult German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen will be performed in its entirety for the first time at La Scala in 2015, during Milan's expo.
Lissner has had his difficult moments. In December 2006 he announced the transfer to La Scala of an updated Parisian production of Leonard Bernstein's opera of Voltaire's Candide, which featured singers dressed only in underpants and wearing masks of politicians, including the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and swimming in a sea of Iraqi oil.
The theatre said the plan was to ask the director to cut "the satirical part" of the production. However Lissner's original decision prevailed and the show made its Italian debut last June, with Berlusconi, underpants and all, earning a seven-minute ovation.
