Double interview with Matteo Franceschini and Stefano Simone Pintor
How did you get to the idea of staging Dorian Gray?
Matteo Franceschini – The Picture of Dorian Gray has always fascinated me because of the strength of the content it conveys and the timelessness of the themes it deals with. I reread the novel a decade ago and immediately sensed the potential for an opera adaptation. Within the framework of the collaboration with the Haydn Foundation as an associate artist that began in 2019, we had planned with Matthias Lošek, the Artistic Director, to create a new opera from scratch. Together we worked on some interesting subject hypotheses, but eventually the choice spontaneously fell on Dorian Gray. Stefano Simone Pintor was quickly involved, first as librettist and then as director, and from then onwards we collaborated closely.
Stefano Simone Pintor – My collaboration with the Haydn Foundation began in 2018 with the staging of another contemporary work, “Ettore Majorana. Chronicle of Endless Disappearances”. That led to a fruitful relationship that continued in 2022 with “Falcone. The suspended time of flight”, another wonderful contemporary opera project. Next comes Dorian Gray, which from the beginning has convinced both Matteo Franceschini and me because of its natural imaginative power. As we confronted the text, going deeper and deeper and working on its operatic translation, we immediately grasped the strong topicality of many aspects that run through it.
What was your approach to the text and the construction of the work?
Stefano Simone Pintor – The interesting and longest part of this project was the construction of the structure. I started from a quote by Wilde: “Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray – what Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.” The relevance of the text stems from the fact that it is us, the readers of today, who make it as such, we complete it with our innermost images and desires, with our own baggage of experiences. This led us to muse on the possibility that it was Dorian Gray himself who was the portrait of everyone else. Not surprisingly, Wilde will have Harry Wotton say that the real masterpiece is Dorian’s life, not the portrait painted by Basil Hallward. We decided to divide the work into six chapters, one for each of the six secondary characters: in addition to them, there is Dorian Gray, a kind of elusive and ineffable presence. In the end, writing the text, choosing words, was a kind of final chiseling.
Matteo Franceschini – It is precisely this intention of choralism that is transversal in the work and starts from the creative communion of intent between Stefano and me. Much of the work was done, as mentioned, on the subject: everything comes from there. The centrality of the seven characters, seven like the deadly sins, is particularly important.
Matteo Franceschini, how was it to set the work with the orchestra and singers?
In composing an opera, it is fundamental for me to start with vocality. I consider the voice to be the theatrical instrument par excellence; as soon as we have a voice on stage that speaks, sings or whispers, we make theater. In Dorian Gray I decided to work on an extreme vocality, widening the extensions and looking for new timbral solutions. A search dictated by the personality of the protagonists and how, with Stefano, we decided to represent them: powerful, radical, ambiguous. The orchestral sound, while materializing concretely in the final stage of the production, is for me intrinsic to the characters themselves. The orchestra does not simply accompany but “is” within each character and within the action itself.
Stefano Simone Pintor, in terms of the direction, what should we expect?
It has been said that the power of Wilde’s text lies entirely in its ability not to describe but to make the reader imagine Dorian’s sins. The difficulty, from the point of view of directing, was to make a play about something that is totally imagined and to do it through a language, the language of theater, that cannot ignore an inherent visual component. So, I thought I would play with illusion and allusion. All the action is enclosed in a large frame, as if what we see is nothing more than a large canvas in constant becoming, or a mirror, our mirror. The characters and places in the play continually appear and disappear before the viewer’s eyes. Everything we see on stage thus becomes a living portrait of the many situations we find in our daily lives. Frames intersect with each other just as space and time intersect with each other. This aspect is not only related to the search for a theatrical aesthetic, to the idea of representing multiplicity, the interweaving of stories, lives and characters.
What did you feed on to work on this opera?
Stefano Simone Pintor – In the preliminary study, Wilde’s letters and the De profundis were important, as well as the texts that inspired The Portrait of Dorian Gray such as Huysmans’ novel A Retroso and the strand of Faustian legend, the myth of the pact with the devil, and then the theme of the double, which also ran through the studies of psychology at that time. Also important was a text by Umberto Galimberti, The Deadly Vices and the New Vices. But there is nothing that inspired me more than today’s media: there are some particularly difficult themes in this work, such as violence or the impossibility of recognizing a romantic detachment, which unfortunately were ubiquitous in the daily news while we were building this project and which inevitably fueled it.
Matteo Franceschini – It is interesting, perhaps, to turn the question around. I think that every project we decide to do today is connected in a double way to what we live: they can be important and deep issues that sometimes we don’t know how to answer, or simpler but equally meaningful and inspiring life experiences. So I think it is our everyday life and the perception we have of it that led us toward Dorian Gray. Beyond the beauty of the novel and the Victorian period that I hold dear, there is something profound and extremely relevant in Wilde’s text.
One should see Dorian Gray because…
Stefano Simone Pintor – First of all, going to the theater today is an act of cultural resistance: a person decides to devote his or her time to something that is never just entertainment, but an investigation of our world and how we inhabit this world. Through a story like this, full of themes that have to do with our obsessions and dramas, I think it is possible to look inside ourselves. We can slow down and think. I think that’s what going to the theater is all about: being open enough to welcome a question that triggers in us a direction, rather than an answer.
Matteo Franceschini – To feed the spark of curiosity, to confront other realities, to learn about different music, techniques and thoughts. In this way, creativity is conceived not only as intuition but as a synthesis of the reality that lives around us, the objects, people and sensations that stimulate our perception.
