<<  -- 10 --  Roderic Dunnett    LUCIANO CHAILLY

Chailly revelled in Buzzati's sense of black comedy, the disquieting and the grotesque, equally evident in their other collaborations -- notably the J B Priestley-like Procedura penale (Como, 1959), a wry conversation piece in which a casual conversation gradually reveals that one of the speakers is a murderer. Buzzati was himself Chailly's librettist for this, while also furnishing, and advising on, the stories for Ferrovia soprelevata (a 1954 RAI commission premièred in Bergamo), Era proibito (Piccola Scala, 1961) and Il Mantello. Any three of these Buzzati operas would make a gripping triple bill. The relationship did not end there : from Buzzati also came the idea for Chailly's ballet Fantasmi al Grand-Hotel (La Scala, Milan, 1960; it was composed a year earlier, the same year as Il Mantello, which was premièred in Florence just three months after the Buzzati ballet).

The same sense of dark, biting irony drew Chailly to those two poets of paradox, Ionesco (1912-94) and Pirandello, on which he based two further stage works. Chailly's taste for mischief and grotesquerie accorded well with Ionesco's.

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