La Cenerentola

A big house of fire rises. It is dressed in a Pompeian fresco red, a beautiful rosso pompeiano shaded by browns and ochres that could well be the shades of the yellow of Naples from the lava of Vesuvius. Eric Ruf's set - the administrator of the Comédie Française has become a scenographer - erects this majestic house, a Neapolitan palace with a flamboyant mineral façade on a rugged bed of black lava and ashes.

La Cenerentola belongs to a consumed world, this volcanic Cinderella of Guillaume Gallienne celebrates the end of innocence, in a universe that has collapsed. This lost innocence is at the wedding with goodness. Cinderella is a young girl who loves and forgives, virtues that are missing in our time and that the director from the French department exalts.

This Cinderella of Italy, this Angelina of Rossini, hangs on our days its ideal benevolence. Light as the airy harp that plays her music, she has escaped in Guillaume Gallienne's Italian comedy, with its despicable and touching monsters, its boasts between frivolity and gravity, its joyful and cheerful creatures.

Here is a ball with a joyful story, a love story full of fantasy, which makes you want to believe in fairy tales and fairies. So much the worse if there is no good fairy, no slipper, no pumpkin, but a philosopher and a bracelet, we still find the evil sisters, the very young naive girl who goes from abused childhood to triumphant happiness, the decomposed family with its neuroses. It is no longer a tale, but its essential moral vibrates, goodness prevails over cruelty.

When Stéphane Lissner asked Guillaume Gallienne to direct Rossini’s La Cenerentola, his initial reaction was to ask why he had chosen him. The director of the Paris Opera replied: “Because it’s about the family, it’s funny and it’s cruel.”

Actor, director and member of the Academie Française, Guillaume Gallienne directs his first opera with this production of La Cenerentola. The photographer Éléna Bauer has captured the atmosphere of the production as it takes shape. Commentary by Guillaume Gallienne.   

“Shortly after accepting the commission from the Paris Opera, Marie Lambert, my assistant, and I discussed Italian cinema. We evoked Riso Amaro, Anna Magnani, Ettore Scola and Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, Respiro and Valeria Golino …”

“Beaten and deprived of her name, Angelina can literally only smoulder in silence. In her stark misery, however, there is a fire threatening to blaze up. When I went to hear Teresa Iervolino in the role of Angelina in Palermo, she pleased me enormously: I said to myself that she could be that volcano.”

“How can the Prince and Angelina recognise each other? How can it be obvious that this is love at first sight? Angelina is emotionally handicapped because she has been starved of affection. And what of him? Where does his fragility come from? And what is his relationship with Dandini? Why does Alidoro call Angelina his daughter?"

“I’ve seen numerous versions of La Cenerentola. Very opera buffa productions. They didn’t really interest me. I had the impression that there was something else in the music. When I direct the singers, I tend to streamline enormously. When a performer says: ‘ I have the impression of not acting’, I say to him, ‘That means you’ve struck the right tone."