Christoph Seuferle called me up, asking if I’d like to stage L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI. What he couldn’t know was that I’d fallen in love with the opera when I was a student. Our singing teacher at the conservatoire in Mexico City brought in a DVD of an old performance featuring Frank Lopardo and Agnes Baltsa, directed by Claudio Abbado. I was transfixed. Such fresh music, wild and vivacious. It was a revelation to me!

They say the 21-year-old Rossini dashed off L’ITALIANA in only 27 days. IL BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA, his masterpiece, came after, but you can already hear his musicality, the richness and virtuosity, the influence of Mozart and Haydn. Most noticeable are his creativity and the musical energy that he invests in the farcical story. Isabella, the Italian, is searching for her lover, gets taken captive in Algiers and uses her wits and guile to regain her liberty – and her lover. The tale is so densely and feistily told, musically and dramatically, that we don’t question anything. Riveting and fantastic.

So I jumped at the opportunity, and our next phone calls dealt with how we might go about subverting the xenophobic, colonialist tropes of »good Italians« and »goofy Algerians and Turks«. I liked Christoph’s idea of setting the action in a boxing environment, except the spartan aesthetic of the boxing stadium wouldn’t have sufficed for a three-hour opera. Rossini is equated with commedia dell’arte, opera buffa, and a lot of movement, nonsense and heart.

I was thinking more of the physical comedy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin – and suddenly the scales fell away and it hit me: Lucha libre, or Mexican wrestling! The wrestlers are decked out like Azteks with their bright masks and glittery capes. My childhood heroes were guys like »El Santo« and »Blue Demon«, I’ve got albums filled with photos. Lucha libre fuses fight theatricality and show in an art that never takes itself seriously. Its costumes and glitter and over-the-top-ness make it camp – just like Rossini! Why not hold the heroine captive in a »Seraglio gym« with shades of Italy, Algeria and Mexico – and two opposing wrestling teams facing off against each other. It all kind of clicked.

Furious genius: Gioacchino Rossini wrote L’ITALIANA at the age of 21 in less than a month. He followed it with IL BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA © Alamy Stock

 

Next up is the job of fitting the characters to the world of wrestling. A slave becomes a »luchador«, a courtier becomes a manager, the Bey of Algiers becomes »El Bayo«, the team trainer. Doing that for the entire opera is the biggest task, and the more fun I have, the more certain I am that the idea is viable. I go through it scene by scene, noting what each protagonist should be doing at a given moment. I end up with sketch books and a score plastered with a mass of multicoloured arrows and notes on characters’ movements. It’s like a dance, and timing is everything in comedy. It’s a choreography of gestures, looks and silences. And the more dynamic the music, the more precise your work has to be.

There’s even going to be a »genuine« wrestling match to accompany the iconic septet at the end of Act 1. You’ve got this chaotic welter of staccato singing, »Boom, boom, boom. Ding, ding, ding. Tack, tacka, tacka, tack«, but to an exact beat, very reminiscent of Warner Brothers’ cartoon music. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Tasmanian Devil… those were my other heroes as a child and I’ve drawn on them too for this production. Watch the »Loony Tunes« films; they’re like little Rossini operas – totally hyper, maximum musicality and ultra-choreographed.

If you ask me, everyone’s going to have a wild time. But my maxim is always »prima la musica!« and this time is no different. Ideas should support the music, not the other way round, and that’s precisely why it’s such fun working on L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI. The amazing thing about this Rossini gem is that there’s not a single weak moment or dull scene. It’s always the music that’s narrating this absurd story and entertaining us.