How seriously did famous Italian opera composers take their food? The answer is that most of them believed eating well to be at least as important as making music well. “I have wept three times in my life,” wrote Gioachino Rossini, the genius who gave us The Barber of Seville and 38 other operas. “Once when my first opera failed. Once the first time I heard Paganini play the violin. And once when a truffled turkey fell overboard at a boating picnic.”
The culinary lives of Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini and Vincenzo Bellini are the subject of a delightful new radio series called Opera on a Plate. Presented (against a background of apt arias) by the Italian TV producer Walter Iuzzolino, it will occupy Radio 3’s late-evening The Essay slot all this week. “The aim,” says Francesca Marchese, the Italian journalist who devised the series, “was to do a cooking programme for opera lovers and, on the other side, a music programme for cooking enthusiasts.” So each 15-minute programme focuses on a different composer (though Verdi, as befits his towering stature, gets two slots), and asks a distinguished Italian cook to create a dish inspired by, or associated with, that composer.
In the opening episode we get none other than Giorgio Locatelli, culinary maestro of the famed restaurant by that name in the National Gallery, London, creating his own version of cannelloni alla Rossini. “I guess Rossini grew up eating the cannelloni his mother cooked,” Locatelli tells us in the programme. “But when he made his own cannelloni he enriched it. He was a man who loved to create and enjoy lavish spectacle, both in the theatre and on the dinner table.”
The chef Giorgio Locatelli
CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES
Rossini certainly didn’t stint himself or his dinner guests. “If you visit the Rossini museum in Pesaro,” Marchese says, “you can see the really long menus he wrote. Entrées, risotto, macaroni, fish, pastries, stuffed turkey, cheese — all in one meal. He was passionate about rich flavours. In fact most of the Rossini recipes you find in Italian restaurants — pasta alla Rossini, chicken alla Rossini and so on — are homages to this taste for rich food, rather than dishes he devised himself.”
What about tournedos Rossini, that extraordinary combination of beef, black truffles, foie gras and madeira wine? How come a classic of French cuisine carries the name of an Italian composer?
“Well, the story behind this is that Rossini liked to go into the kitchens of restaurants he visited to speak to the chefs and try to add new ingredients to what was on the menu,” Marchese says. “But on this occasion [reputedly at the Café Anglais in Paris] the chef refused to add Rossini’s suggestion of foie gras to the beef dish. The chef said, ‘No, this is my recipe, if you don’t like it you can turn round and go away’ — turn being ‘tourner’ in French. So that’s where the name tournedos Rossini came from. The story is that Rossini went back to his table and added the foie gras anyway.”
Rossini’s love of food spilt into his music, didn’t it? “Yes, he even wrote eight piano pieces dedicated to starters and fruits,” Marchese says. “The first four depict radicchio, anchovies, butter and pickles, and the other four depict dried figs, almonds, raisins and hazelnuts.”
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Verdi was perhaps less of a hands-on gourmet, but took his food just as seriously. In his countryside retreat, a sprawling villa in the village of Sant’Agata, a few miles south of Cremona, he would audition cooks as meticulously as he auditioned singers. And, like a good football manager, he always had subs ready on the bench to cover injuries — employing gardeners, coachmen and maids who could also cook competently in case some catastrophe rendered the actual cook unavailable.
Verdi and his wife also made sure that, when he had to travel abroad for premieres, he wouldn’t starve or be poisoned by foreign muck. “We know,” Marchese says, “that when he went to St Petersburg in 1862 for the first night of La forza del destino, his wife ordered a huge supply of wines and food to be sent ahead of the visit — 100 bottles of bordeaux, 20 bottles of champagne and quantities of rice, macaroni and pasta.”
As in life, so in art. Entire PhD treatises have been written about the symbolic ways in which Verdi incorporated food and wine into his operas — from Falstaff consoling himself with booze after being rebuffed and humiliated by the merry wives of Windsor, to the consumptive courtesan Violetta concealing her illness and despair behind the façade of a lavish banquet in La traviata.
Puccini did the same thing. “The Café Momus scene in La bohème is virtually a menu in music,” says the conductor Renato Balsadonna, one of several musical experts who contribute to Opera on a Plate. But even more interesting, psychologically, is what happens at the start of that opera, when the four impoverished bohemians are desperately trying to eke out a few morsels of food. According to Marchese, Puccini was drawing on his own experience as a penniless student.
“He came from a Tuscan family that was far from rich [he was the sixth of nine children whose father died when he was six]. Then when he went to university in Milan he had no money at all. In fact his letters home to his mum are full of pleas for her to send food. And olive oil too, because in Milan, in the north of Italy, they used oil made of linseed or sesame, which completely changed the taste of the beans that he loved.” Fittingly, it’s Puccini’s beloved beans (for which he wrote down detailed cooking instructions) that are featured in the Puccini programme — cooked by Antonio Favuzzi, the head chef of the Belvedere restaurant in Holland Park, London.
Bellini, the last of the Italian composers featured, is a different case. He wasn’t particularly interested in food, perhaps because he was quite ill for much of his short life — dying at 33 after an intestinal illness. But he does have one famous connection to culinary history. His opera Norma gave its name to a renowned pasta dish featuring aubergine and a rich tomato, garlic and basil sauce, originating in the Sicilian city of Catania where he came from. How did the connection happen?
“The story is that a 19th-century Italian writer and critic, tasting this Sicilian pasta for the first time, exclaimed, ‘This is the real Norma’,” Marchese says. “In other words, this is so delicious and well done that it reminds me of the opera.”
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Is the pasta that good? “Oh, yes,” Marchese says. “I’m from Catania myself and have had pasta alla Norma many times. It’s an incredible dish. You should try it.”
I haven’t done that yet. But I have acquired plenty of first-hand evidence that Italian musicians of our own era are just as fanatical about their food as their 19th-century predecessors were. My first experience of that came when I was a young journalist, sent to Vienna to interview the great Italian conductor Claudio Abbado, who was then in charge of the Vienna State Opera but clearly pining for the cuisine of his native Milan.
After our interview was done he said: “Would you like to join me for supper at the only good Italian restaurant in this city?” Naturally I said yes. We had the best pasta I have ever tasted. Afterwards, Abbado disappeared to talk to the manager for a few minutes. When he returned he said: “So, how was your food?” I replied that it was perfection. “Good,” Abbado said, “because I have just bought the restaurant.”
Opera on a Plate starts on Nov 17 at 9.45pm on Radio 3
Dining and Cooking