<<  -- 8 --  Roderic Dunnett    LUCIANO CHAILLY

But opera was what really made Luciano Chailly tick. Over twenty years (1955-75) he produced twelve operas (a thirteenth followed in the 1980s), mainly one-acters, by turn buffo and chilling, which gave vent to his delight in surreal black comedy and what he called 'grottesca' -- the darkly paradoxical, surreal and grotesque. Having read Literature at Bolgna University he was vastly well-read (his close friends included the novelist Giorgio Bassani). His abiding passion was Chekhov, on whom he based four one-act operas, Il Canto del cigno and Una domanda di matrimonio (both 1956), Vassiliev (1963) and Il libro dei reclami (1975). Possibly the one that gave him most pleasure was the first, Una domanda di matrimonio [listen -- opening section], a hilarious bit of Russian tongue-in-cheek irony, akin to Gogol.

These shorter operas are without doubt compact masterpieces : Chailly was a master, like Robert Louis Stevenson, of controlling tension within an economical time-space. One of the briefest, Markheim (in effect a short music theatre work), is based on Stevenson's dark tale of brusque, premeditated murder and the terrifying onset of conscience, a story as black as Edgar Allan Poe -- or indeed Dostoievsky. It was therefore hardly surprising that Chailly also opted to base one of his two full-length operas on Dostoievsky's The Idiot, staged by Rome Opera as part of the composer's fiftieth birthday celebrations in 1970. Using themes from the opera Chailly later distilled a spirited and challenging string quartet.

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