Luca Ronconi made his debut at La Scala in 1974 with a scandal: his Valkyrie, with the sets and costumes by Pier Luigi Pizzi, translated into the mythology of the nineteenth-century bourgeois family, anticipating the similar operation by Chéreau in Bayreuth, surprises the public but also the director Wolfgang Sawallisch; new disturbances welcome Don Carlo, stripped of the usual processional splendor and loaded with symbols of death, in harmony with Abbado’s musical research.

Today legendary performances, which in the 1980s were followed by two days of Stockhausen’s Licht cycle to inaugurate a path in which the titles of the great repertoire (there will be six season openings entrusted to Ronconi in all) are mixed without hierarchy with unknown or very unknown works. Ronconi’s gaze on the work is work on tradition: a collective past that, even if deconstructed, remains a common language between the artist and the spectators.