Hero Worship, Up Close … Of Italo Calvino

A discomfiting encounter with the celebrated—and revered—Italian writer

By Ian Strasfogel

January 9, 2025

Thanks to a childhood crammed with musical celebrities, I rapidly came to think that there was nothing unusual about being in close proximity to brilliant artists. I felt so comfortable with them that at age five, I offered to play for the great pianist Arthur Schnabel by stomping across the keys of my father’s prized Steinway. (Fortunately, my mother swooped in to avert disaster.)

These encounters with stars of classical music continued all through my high school years. Soon after my father, Ignace Strasfogel—a pianist, composer, and conductor who emigrated to the United States from Poland in 1933—joined the Metropolitan Opera in 1951, a parade of the world’s most famous singers and conductors began tramping up the stairs to our cramped apartment for dinner, and I was allowed to mingle with them during the cocktail hour, before being sent off to do my homework.

Later, when I became an opera director, working with some of the most famous artists of our time—singers like Licia Albanese and Carlo Bergonzi, or composers like Luciano Berio and Hans Werner Henze—my early years with musical royalty helped me keep my cool. I never was starstruck, never felt the least bit intimidated or inhibited by their celebrity.

In other words, I’m an unlikely candidate for an attack of hero worship. I experienced it only once, and I’ve never fully recovered.

That disaster occurred in the winter of 1984, when I happened to tell the Italian experimental composer Luciano Berio that I was going to be in Paris for a few days. He invited me to dine with him and a few of his good friends—members of the so-called quattro moschettieri. At that time, four of Italy’s most prominent artists had abandoned their homeland for the creature comforts of the French capital. The quartet included, besides Berio, the group musician, the post-Pop painter Valerio Adami, the architect Renzo Piano, and the author Italo Calvino. “It’s very informal,” Luciano said. “Renzo is away, but Adami and Calvino will be there.”

“Calvino?” I gulped. Calvino was far and away my favorite living writer.

“Of course. He can’t live in Italy at the moment. No one can. It’s too crazy.”

It was too good to be true. Totally out of the blue, I’d be able to meet the sublime, the indispensable Calvino, whose fiction, a literature of pure dance, pure dazzle, placed him in a class with Nabokov, Borges, and García Márquez?

The dinner was held in the Adamis’ airy, high-ceilinged studio-cum-apartment, filled with his witty, incisive canvases and large-scale portraits of Parisian intellectuals, painted by his equally gifted wife, Camilla.

I no doubt stood out as the only American in a room filled with intense artists and intellectuals, many of them committed Communists—Italian Communists, of course, not the repulsive Soviet breed. These people revered Brodsky and Akhmatova and detested Socialist Realism. Of course, they also scorned President Reagan for his belligerent anti-Communism. Such people often treated me to lengthy diatribes against him and, by extension, America. I was always annoyed by their glib anti-Americanism. I wasn’t a Reagan fan either, but surely we bumbling Americans were preferable to the tyrants lodged in the Kremlin.

Politics receded as I studied the large crowd of strangers assembled in the Adamis’ impressive living space. The only people I knew were Luciano and his wife, Talia. I greeted them, and Talia, sensing my discomfort, took me by the arm and introduced me to an elegant gray-haired woman. “Ian,” she said brightly, “I’d like you to meet Signora Esther Calvino.”

No, I didn’t immediately ask her to introduce me to her husband. I wasn’t that gauche. Actually, I was happy to meet her—in fact, quite relieved. The truth is I always prefer talking to women at parties. I find them far more interested in who you might actually be than most men are. Our gender, alas, seems excessively interested in establishing how high or low you stand in the (real or imagined) pecking order. On this particular evening, I was well aware that I was circulating among a swarm of A-listers. Luciano was one of the most prominent composers of the day. Adami was widely collected and represented by the powerful Marlborough Gallery. As for Calvino? Well, he was Calvino, and that, for me, said it all.

This isn’t to say that I had no business being there, that I was the one plebe among the aristocracy. I was doing exceptionally well at the time. I’d recently created the world premiere of Wassily Kandinsky’s so-called color light opera, The Yellow Sound, for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It had been a great success and was about to be presented by the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, my first European production. In those days, American directors rarely got the chance to work over there. I’d clearly moved up a notch.

I mentioned some of this to Signora Calvino, and we quickly launched into a lively discussion about Kandinsky and his peripatetic life in Russia, Germany, and France. Her first name, Esther, suggested to me that she might be Jewish, which probably added to the easy flow of our conversation. Being a Jew in the Europe of the 1980s was still a tricky business, and I, even though adamantly secular, always had my antennae out for any slight, real or implied.

Signora Calvino and I seemed very much attuned to each other, very much in gamba—that delightful Italian expression of mutual sympathy. When she dashed off to get a dish of the pasta our hosts had prepared, I felt bereft. After all, we lived on different continents; we’d probably never meet again. As I scanned the room, I saw Esther’s husband sitting by himself, facing away from the large crowd as they chatted gleefully in French, Italian and English.

That was my moment. I went up to him and introduced myself. He looked at me with those big black eyes of his, exuding kindness, generosity, and (of course) intelligence. No matter how dazzling and renowned his work, it clearly hadn’t gone to his head. He made himself available without hauteur or grandezza. It was just the two of us, person to person. I stared into his deep, penetrating eyes—eyes that saw the world so clearly, so indelibly, so inimitably. I gathered my forces, took a deep breath, and spoke.

And spoke and spoke and spoke and spoke.

About opera, of course. It made perfect sense. He was working on his second libretto for my friend Berio (with whom I was really close during that time. I’d just directed his opera Passaggio for the Aix-en-Provence Festival). I regaled him with stories of my early adventures with Luciano in New York, when we both were teaching at Juilliard and planned to shake up the American opera scene. (In truth, we barely shook it at all.) I got in the groove and gained momentum and rhapsodized about the complex art form that entranced and enchanted me, that haunted my life and my dreams.

And then I noticed where I was and what I was doing. I was quite literally on my knees before Italo Calvino as he sat in an armchair facing me politely, his plate of pasta balanced carefully on his lap. I was his worshipper, his slave. I’d never done that before. I’d never been so overwhelmed by another human being—not by star conductors like Karl Boehm or Fritz Reiner, nor the great tenor Lauritz Melchior, nor the diva Birgit Nilsson, nor Bernard Malamud or Elie Wiesel. I’d never, ever behaved like that to any of those remarkable human beings. But this was Italo Calvino.

Then, suddenly, shockingly, I saw his face, as if for the very first time. His expression was still polite and kindly, but blank, frozen, a mask of grim forbearance. The inner light behind his big, black eyes had extinguished. I’d bored the poor man to death.

As if that weren’t enough, at the height of my embarrassment I recalled something I’d observed at the end of a fancy dinner party given by my parents decades earlier. Mom and Dad had brought together the eminent conductor William Steinberg with a couple who served as trustees of the Metropolitan Opera. The wife, as we rapidly found out, was an unrelentingly enthusiastic fan of William Steinberg. All evening, she fussed over him, oohed and aahed at his every word, while his discomfort grew and grew. Finally, at the evening’s end, he took my father aside and, pointing to his fangirl standing nearby in her full-length mink coat, quoted the last line of Richard Strauss’s Salome: “Man toetet dieses Weib!” (“Kill that woman!”).

Even now, decades later, I ask myself if Italo Calvino felt that way about me.
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Image credits: Above, Tullio Saba / Public domain. Right-hand column, Johan Brun / CC BY-SA 4.0

Ian Strasfogel is an author, opera director, and impresario who has staged over a hundred productions of opera and music theater in European and American opera houses and music festivals. His comic novel, Operaland, and his biography of his father, Ignace Strasfogel: The Rediscovery of a Musical Wunderkind, were both published in 2021.

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