ABBADO AND PRESS

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
September 3rd 2006

The Magic Flute

As conductor Claudio Abbado collaborates with his opera-director son Daniele on an acclaimed production of 'Die Zauberflöte', Daniele tells Rupert Christiansen why he was determined to go his own way

In 1974, the conductor Claudio Abbado confronted his stroppy teenage son Daniele and told him: "No more three-month summer holidays - you've got to work."

The Abbados decided to collaborate on Mozart's Die Zauberflöte during a long car journey

However, what he had in mind wasn't excessively gruelling, as the boy was thrillingly sent off to the Edinburgh International Festival to help backstage at the King's Theatre on a production of Le nozze di Figaro, conducted by Dad's friend Daniel Barenboim.

And Daniele enjoyed himself so much that he came back to the King's three years later, to assist the director Piero Faggioni on a now legendary version of Carmen, conducted by his father and starring Teresa Berganza and Placido Domingo. "Beautiful memories," Daniele sighs.

Nearly 30 years later, he's back in Edinburgh again to run his own show, and can't believe how much the city has changed or "how on earth we ever managed anything at all" in the cramped and tiny King's.

Now he is more comfortably accommodated in the generously proportioned Festival Theatre, where he's re-mounting his highly successful touring production of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte ("The Magic Flute") for two sold-out performances.

It's a show that's been a huge success in Italy and Germany over the past 18 months, and to complete the circle Claudio Abbado is conducting - sublimely, it has to be said, on the evidence of the DG recording released earlier this year.

The two men don't make a habit of working together. "Claudio and I both hate the father-son thing - that business when the genius papa pushes forward his not terribly talented boy, and everybody is embarrassed but can't say no. So I've gone my own way, and I call our relationship a positive story. Not that Claudio was ever dominating: he and my mother divorced when I was young, so he wasn't a constant pressure or presence."

This is the first time they've prepared an opera togther. Previously, they've tested the collaboration with an autobiographical film and some concert performances of Prokofiev's film score for Alexander Nevsky and Shostakovich's King Lear, where Daniele edited the film to match the orchestral versions.

The Zauberflöte project was born during a long shared car journey, just after Daniele had been appointed to his current post as artistic director of the theatre and opera house in Reggio-Emilia.

Daniele asked his father point-blank whether he'd be interested in either of two operas he'd never performed publicly before - Fidelio or Die Zauberflöte. Fidelio, it transpired, was already slated into Claudio's diary, but he said yes to Zauberflöte, with happy results.

"It's a production that over the 18 months of its existence has grown as it has moved from place to place," says Daniele. "Every time we come back to it in a different location, the cast has changed slightly and people move roles. In Edinburgh, for instance, Julia Kleiter, the girl who first sang Papagena, has become Pamina. But it's always like a big family reuinion, very relaxed and straightforward."

Daniele's approach to the opera is correspondingly untricksy, and, despite his university degree in philosophy, he hasn't chosen to explore the libretto's mystical theology or masonic dimension.

"You have to find some point of contact that's more contemporary - perhaps the very simple idea of people of all races and religions coming together, with music being the medicine that can heal all rifts."

Mozart's magic has loomed large in Daniele's career of late - he staged another version of Zauberflöte in 2002, and for Reggio-Emilia he directed a 250th birthday tribute to the composer: all three of Mozart's collaborations with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte - Figaro, Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni - performed by an ensemble cast taking various roles, staged within one basic set.

However, Daniele is better known in Italy as a director of modern repertory, both operatic and theatrical, with everyone from Hans Werner Henze to Sarah Kane on his curriculum vitae.

"In some ways, new work is more difficult because you have to make a beginning," he says. "In other ways, of course, that is liberating."

Fortunately, Reggio-Emilia is a city that is receptive to novelty - "Unlike our neighbour, Parma, which is devoted to the memory of its most famous son, Giuseppe Verdi." A post-industrial centre of hi-tech engineering, with full employment and Italy's highest rate of mixed-race marriages, Reggio-Emilia makes a fascinating social laboratory for the cultural experimentation on which Daniele thrives.

He expresses relief that the draconian cuts to the arts budget enforced by the Berlusconi government have to some extent been reversed under Romano Prodi, and he believes that there is hope that the unions' stranglehold over theatres can now be loosened.

"The important thing is not to play their game. Instead, I try to inspire my workforce to believe in what I'm doing as passionately as I do, and so far that approach seems to be working."