Restoration man | 3 May 2018

As the curtain opens on the second act of Don Pasquale, I hear a rustle of discomfort. Donizetti’s opera has not been seen at La Scala since 1994. Its restoration, on the orders of a new music director, sets off a critical flutter and Davide Livermore’s new production, set in the Cinecittà film studio during the 1950s dolce vita, seems designed to tweak the Roman nose of national vanity.

Italy is supposed to be a serious country these days, burying buffoonery and hedonism among the Coliseum ruins. Even Silvio Berlusconi is seen as an archaeological relic, not to be disturbed. So Riccardo Chailly’s embrace of opera buffa in his first full season as music director provokes the kind of disquiet that we might feel if Covent Garden reinstated Gilbert and Sullivan.

In a state with more governments in half a century than I’ve owned overcoats, La Scala has long been a beacon of stability — only three music directors since Claudio Abbado’s appointment in 1968, each struggling to balance national heritage against much-needed renewal. Abbado, the most radical, put on cut-price shows for factory workers, engaged the innovative Giorgio Strehler and premièred complex modernisms by Dallapiccola, Nono and Stockhausen.

His successor, Riccardo Muti, focused on restoring the composer’s cut, culminating in a Rossini William Tell that lasted nearly six hours. After Muti quit in a 2005 staff revolt, there was a decade’s interregnum in which Daniel Barenboim took the baton for a bit. Chailly’s arrival last year was greeted with internal relief, the return of a maestro who has known the place inside out since he was a kid in short pants, who became Abbado’s assistant when he was just 18. Now 65, he has headed the orchestras of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, but La Scala was always a life’s mission he was never going to shirk.