Fabio, a Legal Studies Graduate Backstage at La Scala

In the complex of the former Ansaldo plant on Via Tortona in Milan, Rossini's opera L'Occasione Fa il Ladro was being rehearsed, which will be performed at La Scala by the Academy's students starting on 18 September. In the large rehearsal room, young singers dressed in casual attire alternate on stage, listen to advice from the director, Sonja Frisell, and ask another young man jumping up and down on stage with a large book in hand for repeated explanations.

Fabio Ceresa

The large book is the director's score, a volume which has the score printed only on the left-hand pages; the right-hand pages get filled in by the director with detailed instructions about the artists' movements, expressions and behavior of the. The young man helping the La Scala director is Fabio Ceresa, born in 1981 and a Bocconi graduate in law. "These are the scene rehearsals," he explains, "and they're done to improve acting. Singing rehearsals happen at a different time."

Fabio is the youngest assistant director at La Scala, though he honed his professional choice relatively late, during his university studies at Bocconi. "I've always been passionate about this kind of music," he says, "and when I was a kid in Rivolta d'Adda, I would buy opera music albums with my allowance. I played music and I sang, but only at an amateur level."

His interest was clear during his exam in private law with a musician like Giovanni Iudica, where the discussion turned towards opinions on legal events in opera storylines. "One of the conclusions we came to," remembers Fabio with a smile, "is that the contract between Faust and Mephistopheles should be nullified because a soul is not an available good."

Fabio watches singers as they rehearse

It was during his second year at university that Fabio decided to try out an artistic venture, while continuing his studies ("my parents insisted on it," he says, "and now I am grateful to them"). The road that leads to La Scala is full of rather random opportunities that must be seized quickly. "Through friends of friends," he says, "I met a director who was staging an opera outside the city and, knowing about my interest, he asked if I wanted to help. Then someone else asked me to act as director for another small production and then a real director noticed me and offered me an internship at La Scala. That was three years ago and I'm still here."

For Fabio, a parallel vein to directing is writing music. "When I was younger, like a lot of other kids, I wrote poetry, but I paid a lot of attention to the structure and the metrics in particular rather than the content. Later I discovered that lots of musicians need people who know how to write text based on their metrics, or their music."

In this case too, you can see a chain of events that, since the first attempts he showed his friends, turned into writing a libretto that would act as the base for a musical composition contest that never happened. "But Daniele Zanettovich, a musician involved in the project, enjoyed the libretto and wanted to add music to it. So it was published." His most recent success was winning the CIDIM, the Italian Music Committee, Kinderszenen for an opera for children: Fabio wrote the libretto for "Once upon a time there was ... King Thunder!" based on Luigi Capuana's fairy tale, and Daniela Terranova put music to it.

"In the world of music, no one is ever required to have a university degree," says Fabio, "but the fact that I finished my studies at Bocconi marks me as a reliable person right away and that's important. And, a few years ago, when we needed to move a table to let the audience exit at the end of an opera, I had to ask one of the artists for help, someone who at first had told me he was an international singer. I told him that I had graduated from Bocconi and then we moved the table together, as equals."