The director of spectacular operas, plays and films was 96
time Franco Zeffirelli felt he was a special person was in the late 1940s, when he was in his 20s. Slim, blond and blue-eyed, he could smoulder like Montgomery Clift, all charm and corner-of-the-eye looks. People panted round him to get his favours, of one sort or another. He was merely playing small roles in theatre then, and painting sets, but he began to hear a buzz about him, a murmur of “Zeffirelli!”, even from the gallery seats.
Yet his name had once meant almost nothing. He was illegitimate, and his mother, obliged to conceal his father, had meant to call him “Zeffiretti”, little breeze, after a Mozart aria. A clerical error made him what he was. At school in Florence, asked to state his father’s name, he could give only the official “N.N.”,. After his mother’s death, when he was six, a cousin he called Aunt Lide brought him up.
Charm certainly helped with the divas he met. He became one of Callas’s rare confidants, after hanging around her dressing-room door for weeks like a lovesick boy and fetching trinkets for her. It was he who suggested that she ought to try a lighter repertoire, and who tailored her triumphant Covent Garden “Tosca” in 1964 to reflect the strains in her own love-life. He also persuaded Sutherland, so stout and awkward, to loosen up, which made all the difference.
As he became more famous and popular the critics increasingly sniped. They wanted art-house films, ugly dark elitist stuff, and mocked his work as reactionary. He knew what these people were, disrupters used by the Kremlin; he had watched communists at work as a child, but had never drunk that poisoned milk. He was a true socialist, whose duty was to move and delight the people, to make them dream.
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