Dali and Bejart and Alessandro Scarlatti in Venice

Synopsis

Opera-goers today often lament the rise of intrusive stage directors who feel the need to reinterpret a composer’s work in startling and often deliberately provocative ways. One recent staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival, for example, featured the chorus dressed up as laboratory rats.

But contemporary directors would have to go pretty far to top a ballet staging that took place at the Venice Festival on today’s date in 1961.

In this case, music by the Italian Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti was specially arranged into a short ballet score for which sets, story, and choreography were provided by two leading avant-garde artists of the day: the surrealist Spanish painter Salvador Dali and the Belgian choreography Maurice Bejart, with an important contribution by La Maison Guerlain, a pricey French perfume manufacturer.

And when we said French perfume played an important role in the staging, we meant it—since big barrels of the stuff were placed on stage to mask the odor of a rotting cattle carcass that was a feature of Bejart’s scenario.

To paraphrase the late Walter Cronkite, “And that’s the way it was—and smelled—August 22, 1961.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Alessandro Scarlatti (arr. Confalonieri) Gala ballet Complesso Strumentale Italiano; Giulio Confalonieri, cond. London LP (out-of-print)

On This Day

Births

• 1827 - Austrian composer Josef Strauss, in Vienna; He was the son of Johann Strauss I and the younger brother of Johann Strauss, II.;

• 1862 - French composer Claude Debussy, in St.Germain-en-Laye;

• 1928 - German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, in Mödrath (near Cologne);

Premieres

• 1968 - Birtwistle: opera "Punch and Judy," at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland;

• 1980 - Tippett: Triple Concerto, for violin, viola, cello and orchestra, in London by the London Symphony, Sir Colin Davis conducting;

• 1982 - Peter Maxwell Davies: "Image, Reflection, Shadow" at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland;

Others

• 1741 - Handel begins work on his famous oratorio, "Messiah," which he finished scoring on September 14 (Gregorian dates: Sept. 2 to 25); The entire work was composed in a period of 24 days;

• 2002 - An opera by the Iranian-Armenian composer Loris Cheknavariyan based on the Persian epic "Rostam and Sohrab" is staged in Teheran to mark the 1000th anniversary of the birth of poet Abol-Qasem Ferdowsi, on whose epic the opera was based; The performance, at Teheran's Milad Hall, featured 125 Austrian musicians and singers; This marked the first occasion that a Western-style opera was staged in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.