And what do you think, Alessandro?

This letter is a translation of the German original · Questa lettera in italiano

On Friday evening, 15 November 2024, our friend, the actor, director, painter and sculptor Alessandro Marchetti, died.

Taking this last step is part of the course of our lives. His, as he himself said again and again, was rich, happy and long. For us, who may or must linger here a moment longer, it is painful to have lost an extraordinary friend and a human lighthouse.

Throughout my adult life, Alessandro Marchetti was my essential point of reference, artistic and human. Alessandro was the theatre. He was an artist through and through: director, actor, theatre manager, painter, sculptor.

We first met in 1985, when he gave us, then in our second year of training at the Teatro Dimitri (today the Accademia Dimitri) in Verscio, Switzerland, a two-week course in Commedia dell'Arte. We soon understood one another: for us, a great master of the theatre had stepped onto the stage, and he was no doubt enchanted by our overflowing energy, which was making ready to lift the world off its hinges. His performance of La maschera e il volto (The Mask and the Face), in which, back then, alone on stage with his Commedia dell'Arte masks, he took the audience of a sold-out house on a journey through the history of the theatre, was one of the few overwhelming theatre experiences of my life, one of those that have shaped my view of the theatre and my work.

Our training was scarcely over when we set about producing our first piece (PALPITATION, 1987), and we actually won Alessandro over to direct it. What emerged was a piece for which theatres and festivals across the world opened their stages to us, and audiences their hearts.
Looking back, with the clarity that distance in time affords, one could say that Alessandro, specialist in the Commedia dell'Arte and a Harlequin of genius, later an astonishing Pantalone, gave us in PALPITATION a particular form of the past, a playful but also codified way of presenting characters and developing their relationships and stories. In PALPITATION one could still recognise the Commedia dell'Arte, illuminating our world with a certain innocence out of a distant past – a world that was about to lose its innocence for good.
PALPITATION told, without words, the love story between a man and a woman – the woman over two metres tall and the man, as the critic of Colombia's most important newspaper El Tiempo estimated, at most half her height. A seemingly simple story with a happy ending, its characters and movements reminiscences of times long gone. With the Storie ErotiComiche delle Mille e una Notte (ErotiComical Stories from the Thousand and One Nights) we then dared to speak, and in ODISSEA and later in HA!Hamlet we developed the playful theatre we had inherited from Alessandro further into a style of our own, carried it over, so to speak, into the present.

In none of the countless performances I have seen around the world have I ever encountered an actor of his quality. Never have I witnessed so extreme a capacity to make every character appear in all its facets, in its whole meaning, fragility and truth.

Only a week before his death, in his room at the Hospice San Rocco in Verbania, he made the ghost of Hamlet's father appear in Shakespeare's words.[1] Happy as children, our eyes shining, we who stood around him were given, by a doomed man, a deep look into the universe of the theatre.

With his wife Luisella he came to all our premieres (as we went to his). His comment on our work was the only one that, in a deeper sense, held meaning for me. And what do you think, Alessandro? His answers were always precise; no one else could analyse and name, with such competence and exactness and at the same time with such respect and such love, where and why something worked, and where the snags were, the stumbling blocks, the flaws in the weave.
Our pieces of the last ten years, some of them research work rather than theatre for a wide audience, delighted him, and even when they were miles away from his great productions and performances, they kindled his insatiable curiosity, with which he met people, the theatre, life.

Sometimes months passed between our meetings; we were travelling, he was on tour with Luisella and his troupe. But there were journeys together too: days in Venice, a shared performance the pretext for time with each other, the dinner with Marchetti and the writer Urs Widmer unforgettable. Then the journey into the Piedmontese Alps seven years ago, just Alessandro and I, a drive into his memory in search of keys to vanished worlds. At eighteen, after the war, he had toured here with his father's company, and he dreamt of seeing again the places that had buried themselves in his memory. In a huge, twenty-year-old Audi with enormous leather seats, which I had inherited a few months earlier, or better: been given, we floated for a few days over the mountain roads of Piedmont. With the memories we found new places, discovered a new world we would go on talking about for years afterwards, a world of wintry mountain landscapes, of deserted places with dolphins as their emblems, of an old, vast hotel in a dark village just short of France, with the two of us as its only guests and dashing waiters who, in the entirely empty dining room, soundlessly served us agnolotti, risotto with white truffles and an elegant Barolo.

Our appearances together rank, for me, among the greatest theatre experiences of all. The piece neither began nor ended on the stage; Alessandro was the spectacle, from the first rehearsals to the farewell at the hotel after the performance. Every word, every sentence, every thought multiplied with him, led to new associations, to other authors and other stagings. In his acting, in his movements, in his words the characters did not merely come to life: they danced, they put on a spectacle which, tragic, comic, burlesque, always told of the same thing: the human being in his lostness, in his disorientation in the midst of an absurd world, a world that does not wish him well and that he loves nevertheless, or for that very reason, unconditionally.

As with every man of the theatre, pathos was Alessandro's constant companion. It was the second year of study at the Scuola Teatro Dimitri in Verscio. I had turned my back on the country of my birth, determined to shape not only my training but the rest of my life far from the so-called Heimat. Alessandro was initiating us into the secrets of the Commedia dell'Arte; we talked about Italian history too, and of course we came round somehow to the state of present-day Italy. Someone made an ironic remark about the Italian way of driving between the lanes; someone else mentioned the mafia; the bombing at Bologna railway station a few years earlier came up; this Italy seemed, to our young, spoilt eyes, a desolate country. Suddenly Alessandro took a step forward and said: One must be careful with judgements. Like every country, Italy has its faults, but that changes nothing about the love for the country. Italy for me is like a mother! And even if my mother is a prostitute, she is and remains my mother.

Those were other worlds for me then. It would never have occurred to me that one could speak like that about one's own feelings, and above all that one could, or would even want to, express anything like love of Heimat. Neither this Italian way of speaking in images nor anything like concrete feelings towards countries meant anything to me. Nothing was further from me in those days than any love of Heimat; I was glad, downy-cheeked as I was, to have escaped this Germany and its brownshirt history by a hair's breadth of time. I found it hard to comprehend this love for a mother who is a country. And yet Alessandro's words impressed me then, and in the forty years that followed I had the good fortune to understand them: to experience his deep bond with his country, and to hear from his own lips the story of his grandparents and parents as Capocomici, actor-managers. During long lunches at his house above Lake Maggiore, lunches that often stretched late into the evening, he took me along on the tours of his socialist father and his troupe through the Italy of Fascism, to the performances of his father's company during the war and on the theatre troupe's forbidden journeys under curfews and blackout orders. And of course on the touring journeys of his own troupe, with all the great works of Italian and European authors. In truth, this love for his mother Italy was an enormous weave of memories of every kind, bound on the one hand to Italy, its history and its culture, and speaking on the other of his love of life, of his work and of the theatre. There is a beautiful expression in Italian, Figlio d'arte: child of art. In English one could say that Alessandro Marchetti was the last of a theatrical dynasty, but that sounds bombastic and entirely immodest, as is the way of dynasties. So: Figlio d'arte, not only the last scion of a family of artists, which has now died out with him, but also, precisely: a child of art.

German theatre culture in the second half of the twentieth century is structured in a completely different way from that of Italy's travelling ensembles, a tradition that runs from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the modern era: in the state, municipal and touring theatres, all tasks were (and are) strictly separated: author, dramaturg, director, set and costume designer, lighting and sound design and so on, each moving only within his clearly circumscribed field. The so-called free theatres that emerged at the end of the Sixties had to do everything themselves, if only for reasons of cost, and the scarcity of means brought with it an impoverishment of sets and costumes – the focus shifted to the What: texts and actors moved into the foreground.

That was the world I knew, the world I somehow expected to grow into. But then, suddenly, here was a man who not only directed, but who, with great art and endless skill, also built and painted the sets, and drew the costumes and had them made to his designs. And he acted like a god. Here, suddenly, was total theatre, theatre as art and as craft and as life: dell'Arte. Eventually Alessandro built and fitted out an entire theatre in the basement of his house, with a tiny foyer, an auditorium and a small but fully equipped stage. For decades, performances, readings, lectures and courses were held here. From your first step into this jewel box you could not stop marvelling: you were surrounded by figures and scenes from the Commedia dell'Arte, painted with the greatest artistry onto the walls and the ceiling in trompe-l'œil, complete with houses, balconies and windows.

Strange: when I think back to our meetings, I have the feeling that in all those years we never exchanged a single banal, superficial word. That is surely not true, but in my recollection, thoughts, ideas, remarks, answers seem always to have carried a deeper meaning; they were full of irony, always of consequence, and the greatness of our conversations becomes clear to me only now, when nothing but memory remains to set them before my eyes.

With his death, Alessandro Marchetti leaves a terrible emptiness.
It is not only that a great human being has gone, a man of the theatre, an artist, a friend; it is as if he had torn a whole world away with him, a theatre world that was perhaps an offshoot of vanished times, times in which the actor really does, as he tried to teach us sceptical fledglings in our first lessons almost forty years ago, stand a step above society, live outside the systems into which ordinary mortals are penned. Systems, connections, he explained, can only be seen and understood if one is not part of them. Not least, he taught me that a proper fee for a performance is also a cultural question, a question of dignity. A similar notion of the dignity of actors, one that is the expression of a deep culture, of great mastery and of an almost boundless veneration on the part of the audience, I encountered two decades later in Russia: there, whether in Yekaterinburg, in Samara or in Novgorod, receptions were given after the performances at the Actor's House, in every city a palatial building at its centre, in which the art of acting and its artists were honoured and celebrated. This cultural greatness that I experienced in Alessandro Marchetti is something that has probably passed. Theatre today seems more like a kind of poking about than load-bearing cultural work, and actors have been reduced to benefit claimants of a society that no longer knows what to do with them.

In his last days, marked by illness but still full of thoughts, of love and of irony, Alessandro took us by the hand to teach us how the last journey, too, is begun. We were speaking of memories, of important moments shared, when, between drips and oxygen tubes, and very much aware of his fate, he whispered with the little strength left to him: Why do you always want to wallow in the past? Let us think instead about which piece we should put on next!

Alessandro Marchetti

[H2:] Alessandro Marchetti

Alessandro Marchetti (born 13 November 1930 in Gorizia, died 15 November 2024 in Verbania) was an Italian director, actor and teacher of acting, and a specialist in Commedia dell'Arte.

As the last descendant of three generations of artists, he combined his work as actor and director with painting and sculpture.

In 1968 Marchetti founded the theatre company Teatro 7 in Milan; in 1970 he succeeded in reopening the renowned Teatro Filodrammatici in Milan. Tours in Italy, in Europe and beyond (Senegal and Japan among others).

As a director he worked at the Stadttheater Ingolstadt, the Stadttheater Bern, the Stadttheater St. Gallen and at the Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele. As a teacher he taught, among other institutions, at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and at the Schauspielakademie in Zurich. His stagings, theatre and opera productions were seen not only in Europe but also in America, Australia, Japan, Africa, the Middle East and Russia.

With his recital La maschera e il volto – a journey through the Commedia dell'Arte he gave more than 500 performances. In collaboration with Marcel Kunz he published the book Arlecchino & Co with Klett & Balmer.

For the last three decades of his life, Alessandro Marchetti lived in Verbania, Italy, together with his wife, the actress and dramaturg Luisella Sala.

In 1994 he founded the Studio Teatro-Accademia for the young people of the province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola. In 2005 he brought the Compagnia Stabile del V.C.O., based in Verbania, into being.

He died on 15 November 2024 in Verbania, two days after his 94th birthday.

The EN edition carries exactly ONE footnote: [1], anchored in the body at "in Shakespeare's words.[1]", resolving to the Hamlet blockquote plus the separate citation blockquote given under HAMLET-QUOTE, placed after the bio box (IT layout). The Shakespeare text is the canonical original, not a back-translation; no translation note on it. The Italian edition's footnote [1] (translation apology for "die Welt aus den Angeln zu heben") is dropped; the idiom is rendered inline as "lift the world off its hinges". Corrections applied per reference sheet: "Compagnia" (DE typo "Compangia"), "Marcel Kunz" in full, "Studio Teatro-Accademia". Internal DE line breaks (<br>) are marked "
" (two in the PALPITATION paragraph, one in the Luisella paragraph, one in the emptiness paragraph); all 16 DE prose paragraphs present, boundaries identical. 15 November 2024 verified as a Friday.

[1]
I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love—

[Separate citation blockquote:]

Hamlet, William Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 5