Director's Cut by Arthur Japin Page A

apartment on the Villa Ada. Sangallo has to stop and think when he hears the visitor’s name through the intercom. Actually, the viscount buzzes him up without a clue who he could be, but as soon as the elevator doors open on the young man, he sees him once again on the Amsterdam stage in his
Ariadne
, with long flowing hair, his youthful body shining through the tight taffeta, one hand on the gilded dagger at his hip, and swathed in meters of crepe de chine that the viscount had flown in from Nanking at exorbitant cost, just to drape around Maxim’s shoulders.
    In each of his operas, Filippo Sangallo had one or two favorites. He never forgot them. When he returned to Rome at the end of the run, they played new roles in the productions of his dreams. Sometimes one of them would visit him, as Maxim is doing now.
    Reality is always a disappointment.
    â€œYour neck is too long for short hair,” is all the old man says. No greeting, no invitation. He turns on his heel and disappears into the shadows of his apartment. Maxim is unsure whether to follow, but then the shutters are thrown open inside.
    â€œLook!” Sangallo is in his study, bent over the fifteenth-century chest of drawers that he uses as a drawing table. On the back of a set design he sketches Maxim’s face in a few lines, the deep-set eyes, his neck, the curve of his chest.
    â€œThat face: handsome but arrogant. It seems almost disconnected from your trunk. But let your hair grow”—he sketches it the way he wants to see it—“and the Olympus from which you look down on us mortals from under your eyelids becomes linked to your body. It makes you gentler. For you, long hair is like a frame around your face. I told you before, I’ll tell you again now. The intangible enclosed in a frame. The head and the heart unified. Is that too much to ask?” With a grand gesture he pushes the charcoal and the sheets of paper into a corner of the marble drawing board. “But now, life itself. Have you eaten? Have you ever tasted the sun in the honey of Piedmont?”
    â€œWithout extras,” Filippo Sangallo was fond of saying, “people would fall asleep from boredom halfway through life.” For years, these young men and women, each decked out more brilliantly than the singers, had been the most expensive part of his productions. In the old days, when he was Luchino Visconti’s partner, there wasn’t a theater manager alive who would dare deny his extravagant demands, but when Filippo decided to continue directing after the death of his lover, he ran into more and more resistance. The biggest opera houses were the first to close their doors. His productions were too expensive and his ideas outmoded. Dissatisfaction grew among the singers as well, whom he still arranged as tableaux vivants at a time when other directors were letting them scream and roll around on the floor. Finally, all he had left were minor companies in countries and states so small that they needed tosubsidize their culture. For the audiences in such places, as undiscriminating as they were, his name still recalled the glory days in which he toured the world with Maria Callas.
    Filippo saw exactly what was going on. He drew up a list of works in which he still wanted to create the images of his dreams. He had no intention of compromising his vision in any way, even though he was more and more frequently obliged to forgo his own fee to achieve it. His most important exigencies invariably involved the extras. Each was like a brushstroke in a painting inside the frame of the stage.
    But it went beyond rehearsals: he surrounded himself with extras outside the theaters as well, young people he had plucked from the rabble that appeared at auditions. He chose them for a look in their eyes, a gesture, a shadow of a memory, the curl of a lip, anything that let him glimpse the kind of beauty sometimes captured in old paintings. All were enthusiasts at