Curtain S A N F R A N C I S C O OPER A
SPRING 2015
B E H I N D
T H E
A P U B L I C AT I O N E X C L U S I V E LY F O R SAN FRANCISCO OPERA CONTRIBUTORS
PHOTO BY SCOTT WALL
The Two Women creative team: Music Director Nicola Luisotti, composer Marco Tutino, director Francesca Zambello and General Director David Gockley.
Two Women: From Novel to Opera
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Luisotti proposed composer Marco Tutino and he or five decades, San Francisco Opera has even suggested a suitable subject for the opera: the been a major champion for the creation 1958 novel La Ciociara (Two Women) by Italian of new work, and the summer of 2015 will writer Alberto Moravia (1907–1990). be marked by a truly unique world premiere: Two Women or La Ciociara, an opera in the Grand Historical Background Italian tradition, sung in Italian, based on an Italian A 1960 film based on the literary source and historical events, book starred Sophia Loren by an Italian creative team. “I wanted an opera and Jean-Paul Belmondo, and “I wanted an opera with a with a gorgeous score was directed by Vittorio de Sica gorgeous score so the audience so the audience is and produced by Carlo Ponti. is crazy with delight to see and Loren won an Oscar for her hear it, not cringing in their crazy with delight to role as Cesira, a young widow seats,” says General Director David see and hear it.” who tries to survive the end of Gockley. “It can be challenging World War II with her teenage for composers to write beautiful daughter Rosetta by seeking refuge outside Rome music because critics often condemn them for it.” in the poor, mountainous region of Ciociaria, Gockley credits Music Director Nicola Luisotti where she was born. with the original idea to commission the new The fictional story is set against a historical opera. “Nicola urged us to follow the example background of horrifying mass rapes and killings of the Metropolitan Opera, who gave the world committed in May 1944 by colonial troops from premiere of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West in Morocco, fighting in Italy under French command 1910.” As a modern day counterpart to Puccini, cont in u e d o n pa ge 6