Franco Zeffirelli says Chinese rituals gave the world a legacy of a unique visual language that reaches artistic perfection. Provided to China Daily

Director Franco Zeffirelli has been influenced by both beauty and hardship

Obsessed with beauty, opera and film, director Franco Zeffirelli cherishes the idea of a final project, the film he has not directed yet, The Florentines.

"But I am afraid I will not be able to carry it out this time," says Zeffirelli, aged 90. "I am ready to face death. Time is coming. I have escaped death so many times, and death is expected when you are this old. Maybe one day, who knows, somebody else will do The Florentines. Everything is ready: the script, the costumes. Really good writers have been working on the story, which is set in the Italian Renaissance. Very accurate research has been done," he says, as his eyes light up. The film he's dreaming about is based on the rivalry between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.

Sensitive and erudite, the prolific director welcomes me into his villa on a hill in Rome as Dolly and Bianchina, two energetic Jack Russell terriers, roam around the living room.

While he has doubts about whether he will ever direct The Florentines, Zeffirelli can look back on a long and illustrious career in film and opera, which has influenced many others who follow in his wake.

He has also had his influences - among them Chinese directors and China itself, which he says he is happy to see embracing opera.

Zeffirelli, who directed Giacomo Puccini's Turandot many times, recalls Chinese director Zhang Yimou's postmodern version, which made its debut in Florence at Maggio Fiorentino, an annual festival of operas, ballets, concerts and plays, in 1997. The production was a sensation. Later, the acclaimed Chinese director brought the Turandot project to Beijing, and last year Yimou's creation embarked on a European tour.

"I fully understand Zhang Yimou's passion for Turandot," he says. "Like Puccini, who traveled from Torre del Lago to China in his imagination via the story of princess Turandot, Yimou goes backs to imperial China through a magnifying lens."

He adds: "Zhang Yimou captured Puccini's zeitgeist with Turandot, which is Italian to the core; a music drama par excellence."

Zeffirelli starts to hum a melody from one of Puccini's scores. "Puccini spiced his score with Chinese music, you know," he says. "He was introduced to it by an acquaintance - a diplomat, collector of oriental art. Around 1910 he heard a Chinese folk song, Jasmine Flower, identified with the Princess Turandot.

"Puccini made us dream China using the sweeping emotional power of the music of the heart. Those melodies are a cry of his agonizing soul, since his last masterpiece had been written, but not finished, before his death."

Chinese cinema has also had an impact on Zeffirelli. His favorite film directors are Zhang Yimou and the Taiwan-born Ang Lee. "Their films are stunning," he says.

And he has long been fascinated by the art of Chinese rituals. "They gave the world a legacy of superb ritual objects. A unique visual language that reached an artistic perfection unparalleled anywhere else in ancient times," he says.

He regrets the choice of Japan for the premiere of the opera Aida. "I would prefer to have marked its debut in Beijing. A key reason for this is that a much richer quality dwells in Chinese culture. Music and dance left incredible traces and still affect today's society in different ways," he says. "I personally heard a lot of traditional Chinese music during my frequent sojourns in Paris, the years when Coco Chanel, such a dear woman to me, introduced me over there."

A new run of Zeffirelli's Aida will be staged at La Scala, in Milan, next season.

As Dolly and Bianchina continue to roam Zeffirelli turns the conversation to the subject of his foundation.

"We are finally starting the Zeffirelli Foundation," he says. "It will be concerned almost entirely with the preservation of my work. We gathered enormous amounts of material."

The foundation will be based in Florence, at Piazza Savonarola. "I have always been close to my hometown, which in my opinion is the most beautiful city in the world. The first gift I had from God was being born in Florence. The city gave the world Michelangelo and Leonardo. Unfortunately, I do not belong to that small elite group of geniuses, but I can modestly say that I am among those Florentines who have distinguished themselves within their own professions in the world. My temperament is so typically Florentine; we are quarrelsome people, fractious hot-blooded individuals."

Zeffirelli studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, starting his career as a set designer. Film director Luchino Visconti took him under his wing as a promising young designer in 1948.

His father's family, the Corsis, came from Vinci. Zeffirelli likes to claim kinship with Leonardo, who also came from that small town outside Florence.

"Corsi was a notable Renaissance last name," he says.

His father, Ottorino Corsi, worked in textiles. "He was an inveterate lothario who spent World War I impregnating Florentine wives," he says. "He seduced my mother, Adelaide Garosi, after the war." Garosi was a fashion designer and Corsi met her professionally, in her atelier.

Being a married woman with three children already, Garosi was obliged to invent a name for her illegitimate child. "For me, she chose Zeffiretti after zephyrs in an aria from Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), but the last name was misspelled in the registry," he says. "My name is very unique and it sounds fresh and springy."

Zeffirelli has dedicated his life to opera and his productions are still in the repertoire. His fondness for it came from his grandfather and uncle.

"A gramophone was always on. Back in Italy, music was a luxury intended for everyone, including the poor," he says.

"I shot all the films I wanted to, while I went back to opera whenever I felt vulnerable and in need of reassurance. Opera for me has always been a sort of a mother figure, the mother I lost when I was 6. It's like being at ease in the arms of a mother when she breastfeeds her baby who demands to be fed more, nuzzling his head against her nipples."

As opera struggles to survive in Europe, in China it is burgeoning. "They do well to invest in this art form," he says. "This means they have understood its educational function, besides its enchantments.

"Opera is about ideas, feelings, themes; not only plots, characters and artists singing beautifully. Opera was engendered in Florence around the 1500s by the Florentine intellectuals who were inspired by Greek melodrama. Opera has not changed much since its birth."

Zeffirelli's eyes mist over as he recalls his past. "Nostalgia is inevitable," he says. "It's like being reunited with a long-lost son."

He ascribes some of his success to the rapport he established with actresses. "A relationship that had something to do with my lost mother," he says. "I always helped them when they needed it. There is an area of panic in every woman."

From his movie career he remembers the actor John Voigt, who starred in a 1979 remake of The Champ, directed by Zeffirelli, as, "a true American, honest and very enthusiastic about his mtier, such a perfectionist". But of Mel Gibson, whom he directed in Hamlet, he says, "I loathe him. He's a cruel guy, a disagreeable person."

Looking back to his childhood, Zeffirelli recalls the time after his mother's death, when he was taken in by one of his father's cousins, whom he called Aunt Lida. The film Tea With Mussolini is a semi-autobiographical tale of Zeffirelli's childhood and the female figures that surrounded him, from his aunt to his English teacher, Mary O' Neill, played by Cher in the film.

"I felt so lonely after my mother's death, then loneliness grew even bigger, knowing that my father was an unprincipled scoundrel," he says. "Whom could I trust? The ladies were the only source of warmth in my life.

"I owe everything to my mother: I was a very wanted child. In the 20s, she had the courage to defend her pregnancy with all her strength. She carried the love child inside her, against the will of all her relatives, who pressured her into having an abortion."

China Daily

(China Daily European Weekly 08/16/2013 page29)