An interview with director Barbara Diana

Abstract

Barbara Diana's colourful personality has obviously provided the staging of the opera Falstaff at the Manoel Theatre with its multiple hues. A musicologist by training, with a deep personal knowledge of operatic singing on the one hand. and theatre staging on the other, Signora Diana, or Barbara as she likes to be called, has even composed music herself. She has published two monographs on the 20th-century composer Benjamin Britten but admits that her favourite opera is Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito. Barbara starts out from an important principle: the main difference between opera and theatre dramaturgy lies in the music. Opera singers cannot choose the time it would take to say their lines; they are driven by the music and its tempo-rhythm, which is also conditioned by the orchestral colour that is applied to it. So how to work with the music of Falstaff and all that it provides? [excerpt]