Lorenzo Mariani is an international opera stage director, artistic director, and educator based in Italy. His productions have been seen throughout Europe, Asia, and United States including Israel, Finland, Sweden, Japan, and China.
Mariani was born in New York City, the son of Italian immigrants from La Spezia. His father, Adolfo Mariani, aspired to be an opera singer and studied voice with lyric tenor Alessandro Bonci, a contemporary of Enrico Caruso. In 1930 Adolfo opened the Asti restaurant in Manhattan, where waiters performed Italian opera, arias and choruses. Over the next 70 years Asti became a Greenwich Village landmark. Rising opera stars including a young Maria Callas sang full-time as soloists at the restaurant[3] whose guests included theater and opera stars Franco Corelli, Luciano Pavarotti, Cesare Siepi, and Joan Sutherland. Mariani’s father became a respected voice teacher himself. As a teenager, Lorenzo accompanied his father on the piano as Adolfo gave lessons to tenor Corelli and Siepi, among others. The Astiwalls were covered with autographed photos of opera greats and celebrities like Joan Crawford, Babe Ruth, and Noël Coward and the décor included four original theater seats from the old Metropolitan Opera House.[3]
Taft and Harvard
At The Taft School in Connecticut, Mariani was deeply involved in music and theater. As head of the student drama group, The Masque and Dagger Society, he directed and acted in several productions. In his senior year, he performed a striking piano recital of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue[4]
Mariani with his parents at his Harvard graduation, 1977
From 2005-2013, Mariani held the position of Artistic Director at the Teatro Massimo ("The Greatest Theater"), located on the Piazza Verdi in Palermo.[1] His nomination was historic, the first time in Italy a stage director was named Artistic Director of an opera house. During his tenure, Mariani established the Teatro Massimo as a point of reference for Opera Houses in Italy and Europe. With innovative projects and programming, he doubled the production output while winning four Premio Abbiati awards (The Franco Abbiati Prize), Italy’s leading award for artistic achievement in Opera. Mariani also undertook prestigious international projects during this time, organizing tours for the Massimo to Japan (Otsu and Tokyo) in 2007 and Finland (Savonlinna) in 2009. In addition, he brought co-productions from theaters across the world, including San Francisco, Bruxelles, Barcelona, Santiago del Cile, English National Opera, staged by artists such as Graham Vick, Damiano Michieletto, Terry Gilliam, Laurent Pelly and Calixto Bieito. Mariani’s pioneer program for children, teens, and young adults established the Massimo as a model for other Italian Opera Houses to develop new audiences. For this, the theater was awarded an Abbiati Prize in 2011. The theater’s fourth Abbiati prize during Mariani’s tenure was for Graham Vick’s production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. During this period, for Rome's Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Mariani staged The Rake's Progress and The Threepenny Opera starring Italian rock Star Elio—a special project commissioned by composer Luciano Berio for the Kurt Weill Centennial.
Post Palermo years (2014-present)
Lorenzo directing Andrea Bocelli in Lucia di Lammermoor in Genova, 2018
In 2002 Mariani volunteered to teach at the Kodaikanal International School in Tamil Nadu, India, giving classes in literature, music and theater. He received a master’s in philosophy at the University of London, Birkbeck College in 2017. His thesis, “Evaluating an Opera Staging: A Proposal for Criteria" was judged “With Distinction” and praised by English philosopher Roger Scruton. At the Royal College of Music in London, he led a seminar in 2017 in which students performed scenes from the operas of Benjamin Britten at The Britten Theater.
Since 2020 Mariani has run the highly successful project “Opera Lab” at the prestigious Accademia Chigiana in Siena—a workshop for conductors, directors, singers, and designers in which students produce and perform an opera each summer under the tutelage of Mariani and other professionals including Daniele Gatti, William Matteuzzi, and Gianni Tangucci. Operas produced include Rossini’s L'occasione fa il ladro, Il Signor Bruschino, Trilogia Verdiana, and most recently Don Pasquale in July 2024.
Currently, Mariani is professor at the Verona Opera Academy where he teaches the “Theory and Practice of Opera Staging”.
External videos
You can watch a video of Lorenzo Mariani discussing his work here
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