Luchino Visconti


Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo, was an Italian theatre, opera and cinema director, as well as a screenwriter. He is best known for his films Ossessione, Senso, Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, The Damned, Death in Venice and The Innocent.

Biography

Luchino Visconti was born into a prominent noble family in Milan, one of seven children of Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, Duke of Grazzano Visconti and Count of Lonate Pozzolo, and his wife Carla. He was formally known as Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone, and his family is a branch of the Visconti of Milan. In his early years, he was exposed to art, music and theatre: he studied cello with the Italian cellist and composer Lorenzo de Paolis and met the composer Giacomo Puccini, the conductor Arturo Toscanini and the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio.
During World War II, Visconti joined the Italian Communist Party.
Visconti made no secret of his bisexuality. His last partner was the Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who played Martin in Visconti's film The Damned. Berger also appeared in Visconti's Ludwig in 1973 and Conversation Piece in 1974, along with Burt Lancaster. Other lovers included Franco Zeffirelli, who also worked as part of the crew in production design, as assistant director, and other roles in a number of Visconti's films, operas, and theatrical productions.
According to Visconti's autobiography, he and Umberto II of Italy had a homosexual relationship during their youth in the 1920s.
Visconti smoked 120 cigarettes a day. He suffered a stroke in 1972, but continued to smoke heavily. He died in Rome of another stroke at the age of 69, on 17 March 1976. There is a museum dedicated to the director's work in Ischia.

Career

Films

He began his filmmaking career as an assistant director on Jean Renoir's Toni and Partie de campagne through the intercession of their common friend Coco Chanel. After a short tour of the United States, where he visited Hollywood, he returned to Italy to be Renoir's assistant again, this time for Tosca, a production that was interrupted and later completed by German director Karl Koch.
Together with Roberto Rossellini, Visconti joined the salotto of Vittorio Mussolini. Here he presumably also met Federico Fellini. With Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis, he wrote the screenplay for his first film as director: Ossessione, one of the first neorealist movies and an unofficial adaptation of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.
In 1948, he wrote and directed La terra trema, based on the novel I Malavoglia by Giovanni Verga.
Visconti continued working throughout the 1950s, but he veered away from the neorealist path with his 1954 film, Senso, shot in colour. Based on the novella by Camillo Boito, it is set in Austrian-occupied Venice in 1866. In this film, Visconti combines realism and romanticism as a way to break away from neorealism. However, as one biographer notes, "Visconti without neorealism is like Lang without expressionism and Eisenstein without formalism". He describes the film as the "most Viscontian" of all Visconti's films. Visconti returned to neorealism once more with Rocco e i suoi fratelli, the story of Southern Italians who migrate to Milan hoping to find financial stability. In 1961, he was a member of the jury at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival.
Throughout the 1960s, Visconti's films became more personal. Il Gattopardo is based on Lampedusa's novel of the same name about the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of the Risorgimento. It starred American actor Burt Lancaster in the role of Prince Don Fabrizio. This film was distributed in America and Britain by Twentieth-Century Fox, which deleted important scenes. Visconti repudiated the Twentieth-Century Fox version.
It was not until The Damned that Visconti received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The film, one of Visconti's better known works, concerns a German industrialist's family which begins to disintegrate during the Nazi consolidation of power in the 1930s. Its decadence and lavish beauty are characteristic of Visconti's aesthetic.
Visconti's final film was The Innocent, in which he returns to his recurring interest in infidelity and betrayal.

Theatre

Visconti was also a celebrated theatre and opera director. During the years 1946 to 1960 he directed many performances of the Rina Morelli-Paolo Stoppa Company with actor Vittorio Gassman as well as many celebrated productions of operas.
Visconti's love of opera is evident in the 1954 Senso, where the beginning of the film shows scenes from the fourth act of Il trovatore, which were filmed at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Beginning when he directed a production at Milan's Teatro alla Scala of La vestale in December 1954, his career included a famous revival of La traviata at La Scala in 1955 with Maria Callas and an equally famous Anna Bolena in 1957 with Callas. A significant 1958 Royal Opera House production of Verdi's five-act Italian version of Don Carlos followed, along with a Macbeth in Spoleto in 1958 and a famous black-and-white Il trovatore with scenery and costumes by Filippo Sanjust at the Royal Opera House in 1964. In 1966 Visconti's luscious Falstaff for the Vienna State Opera conducted by Leonard Bernstein was critically acclaimed. On the other hand, his austere 1969 Simon Boccanegra with the singers clothed in geometrical costumes provoked controversy.

Filmography

Feature films

Other films

YearTitle and ComposerOpera HousePrincipal cast / Conductor
1954La vestale,
Gaspare Spontini		La ScalaMaria Callas, Franco Corelli, Ebe Stignani, Nicola Zaccaria
Conducted by Antonino Votto
1955La sonnambula,
Vincenzo Bellini,		La ScalaMaria Callas, Cesare Valletti, Giuseppe Modesti
Conducted by Leonard Bernstein
1955La traviata,
Giuseppe Verdi		La ScalaMaria Callas, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Ettore Bastianini
Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini
1957Anna Bolena,
Gaetano Donizetti		La ScalaMaria Callas, Giulietta Simionato, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni
Conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni
1957Iphigénie en Tauride,
La ScalaMaria Callas, Franceso Albanese, Anselmo Colzani, Fiorenza Cossotto
Conducted by Nino Sanzogno
1958Don Carlo, VerdiRoyal Opera House,
London		Jon Vickers, Tito Gobbi, Boris Christoff, Gré Brouwenstijn
Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini
1958Macbeth, VerdiSpoleto FestivalWilliam Chapman & Dino Dondi; Ferruccio Mazzoli & Ugo Trama;Shakeh Vartenissian.
Conducted by Thomas Schippers
1959Il duca d'Alba, DonizettiSpoleto FestivalLuigi Quilico, Wladimiro Ganzarolli, Franco Ventriglia, Renato Cioni, Ivana Tosini.
Conductor: Thomas Schippers
1961Salome, Richard StraussSpoleto FestivalGeorge Shirley, Lili Chookasian, Margarei Tynes, Robert Anderson, Paul Arnold.
Conductor: Thomas Schippers
1963Il diavolo in giardino,
Franco Mannino 		Teatro Massimo, PalermoUgo Benelli, Clara Petrella, Gianna Galli, Antonio Annaloro, Antonio Boyer.
Conductor: Enrico Medioli.
Libretto: Visconti & Filippo Sanjust
1963La traviata, VerdiSpoleto FestivalFranca Fabbri, Franco Bonisolli, Mario Basiola
Conducted by Robert La Marchina
1964Le nozze di Figaro,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart		Teatro dell'Opera di RomaRolando Panerai, Uva Ligabue, Ugo Trama, Martella Adani, Stefania Malagù.
Conductor: Carlo Maria Giulini
1964Il trovatoreBolshoi Opera, Moscow Pietro Cappuccilli, Gabriella Tucci, Giulietta Simionato, Carlo Bergonzi
Conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni
1964Il trovatore, VerdiRoyal Opera House, London
Peter Glossop, Gwyneth Jones & Leontyne Price, Giulietta Simionato, Bruno Prevedi
Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini
1965Don Carlo, VerdiTeatro dell'Opera di RomaCesare Siepi, Gianfranco Cecchele, Kostas Paskalis, Martti Talvela, Suzanne Sarroca, Mirella Boyer.
Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.
1966Falstaff, VerdiVienna StaatsoperDietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Rolando Panerai, Murray Dickie, Erich Kunz, Ilva Ligabue, Regina Resnik.
Conducted by Leonard Bernstein
1966Der Rosenkavalier, StraussRoyal Opera House, LondonSena Jurinac, Josephine Veasey, Michael Langdon.
Conductor: Georg Solti
1967La traviata, VerdiRoyal Opera House, LondonMirella Freni, Renato Cioni, Piero Cappuccilli.
Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini
1969Simon Boccanegra, VerdiVienna StaatsoperEberhard Wächter, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Gundula Janowitz, Carlo Cossutta
Conducted by Josef Krips
1973Manon Lescaut,
Giacomo Puccini		Spoleto FestivalNancy Shade, Harry Theyard, Angelo Romero, Carlo Del Bosco.
Conductor: Thomas Schippers.