“Wexford is in my heart. It’s an important part of my story,” Damiano Michieletto says.
That’s not an unexpected comment from a radical opera director. In 2003 his Wexford Festival Opera production of Jaromír Weinberger’s Schwanda the Bagpiper won an Irish Times Irish Theatre Award.
Since then he has built a reputation as one of the most striking opera innovators of his generation. His career has taken him from La Fenice theatre, in his native Venice, to the Salzburg Festival and London’s Royal Opera House.
His 2015 stagings of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci earned him a Laurence Olivier Award, and he has collaborated with everyone from Mika to Simon Rattle (who conducted his staging of Salome at Berlin State Opera in 2021).
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Now comes Michieletto’s debut film. The lavish Primavera offers a snapshot of Antonio Vivaldi’s life as a consumptive priest at the Ospedale della Pietà, a girls’ orphanage, in early 18th-century Venice.
Adapted from Tiziano Scarpa’s novella Stabat Mater, from 2009, the film generated a warm response at Toronto International Film Festival last autumn.
“I liked the fact that it’s about the real character of Vivaldi but not ‘Vivaldi’ as the big historical figure – more Antonio the man,” Michieletto says. “You take the real name, but you forget the legend. Around that you can invent a totally fictional story.
“The combination of these two things freed my imagination. It’s not a biopic, not a documentary about his life. It’s just a possibility. That connection between a real character and a world of fantasy is what I like and what the film tries to deliver.”
It’s easy to forget that Vivaldi hasn’t always been well known. He attracted attention during his early career. Born in 1678, Vivaldi was initially celebrated across Europe, particularly for his innovative concertos. After moving to Vienna in 1740, he fell out of favour, losing imperial patronage on the death of emperor Charles VI.
When he died, the following year, he was buried in a pauper’s grave. Much of his work remained unpublished – scattered among manuscripts, held in private collections or by institutions such as the Ospedale della Pietà.
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Unlike contemporaries such as Bach or Handel, whose music was preserved and promoted, Vivaldi was forgotten until as late as the 1920s, when a cache of manuscripts, now known as the Turin collection, was rediscovered in Italy. Scholars began cataloguing hundreds of works, revealing the scale and breadth of Vivaldi’s output.
Michieletto, who grew up in Scorzè, a village near Venice, explains that the composer occupies a peculiar place in the regional imagination. He is part of the Venetian furniture.
“I didn’t know enough about him before,” the director says. “His death, for example. Or the fact that his life was quite so tragic. He was ill, which made life difficult. He tried all his life to become a successful theatrical impresario and never succeeded.
“His final days in Vienna were terrible. He died alone, forgotten, buried in a common grave without a name. And then his music was rediscovered two centuries later. It’s a very romantic story.”
Primavera – Italian for spring – is a work of historical fiction. The film follows Cecilia, a gifted violinist raised in the orphanage after being abandoned by her mother.
Opera taught me how to create an aesthetic. It taught me how to use lines, colours and framing to create emotion. And that beauty is just a tool to deliver emotion
— Damiano Michieletto
Named after the patron saint of music, she grows up in an institution that trains parentless girls to perform while preparing them for eventual marriage. The young women’s lives are influenced by strict hierarchies and by the powerful men beyond the orphanage, from visiting elites to local figures with the financial clout to determine the future of the institution and to strike deals for new brides.
Vivaldi arrives as an ailing priest and working musician. Tasked with revitalising the orchestra, he recognises Cecilia’s ability and elevates her to first violin. Although he becomes central to the institution’s musical revival, his position remains constrained by the same structures that govern Cecilia’s life.
“When I read Tiziano Scarpa’s novel I didn’t know how much was real and how much was invention,” Michieletto says. “Then I took time to study the time period. I found a very big book about the history of the orphanages in Venice, which was very useful. It described how they lived, the rules of the institutions, how everything worked, even technical details like how children were registered.
“That helped create a bigger frame of the place, and we tried to stay very precise. After a few months of research I knew we had enough details to tell a story.”
Michieletto, who studied literature at university in Venice, has courted controversy with his radical opera revisions and restagings. A 2010 version of Madama Butterfly reworked Puccini’s libretto around the theme of sex tourism. In 2015 his production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell was booed for a controversial sequence featuring full-frontal nudity and an implied gang rape. Last year topless ballerinas featured in his production of Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims for Opera Philadelphia.
“Opera taught me how to create an aesthetic,” Michieletto says. “It taught me how to use lines, colours and framing to create emotion. And that beauty is just a tool to deliver emotion.”
He says he still feels “very connected” to the unlikely beginnings of his career at Wexford Festival Opera.
“I still remember the day a conductor in Italy phoned me and said there was an opportunity for a young director to direct a small opera at Wexford Festival Opera,” he says.
“Did I want to go? I said yes, but I had no idea where Wexford was on a map. I found myself in this little city in the south of Ireland. At that time it was quite difficult for me with the language – also because they were speaking English but with a strong Wexford accent. That was totally new. And then they invited me back the year after to do one of the productions, which won the Irish Times award.”
Michieletto has wanted to work in cinema for as long as he can remember, but he was determined not to take on a movie for the sake of it. Crafting a film, he notes, is an adjacent but separate skill set from staging opera.
“The main difference is that in cinema everything passes through the point of view of the camera,” he says. “You can change everything just by moving the camera. In theatre you have a fixed perspective for the whole show. If people are still, it stays still. You have to move the actors more.
“Performance is different, too. In cinema, if you go too big, it looks ridiculous. You have to work with detail, especially with our movie, with wigs, costumes and make-up. It’s already heightened, so the acting must be very simple, not melodramatic. The dialogue is also very simple and not overly period-specific. It’s direct.”
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We meet shortly after Michieletto served as creative director of the opening ceremony for the 2026 Winter Olympics, a multilocation event that spanned northern Italy from San Siro Stadium in Milan, to the town of Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Alps, and featured live performances from Mariah Carey and Andrea Bocelli.
As with Primavera, the Olympics allowed Micheiletto to work beyond the confines of material already created by a composer and librettist.
“It was a big event, but it’s a project that started years in advance and had a huge organisation,” he says. “We were facing all the problems in a very relaxed way.
“The only problem we had was that it rained all day during the last week of rehearsal. We rehearsed in the rain and without costumes, because it was impossible to dry them.
“But luckily, on the opening night, it was beautiful weather, and everything went really, really well.”
Primavera is in cinemas from Friday, April 24th
