FARINELLI Voce Regina

by Ida Renzicchi

Photos from the private archive of Gianni Quaranta

I take advantage of the kindness of Maestro Gianni Quaranta who created the wonderful scenography of “Farinelli Voce Regina” and who, by allowing me to publish the photos of his personal archive relating to the film, made precisely on the life of the famous “musico”, offers me the opportunity to present the dramatic, biographical and musical film realized in 1994 directed by Belgian director Gérard Corbiau.

Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi aka Farinelli (Photo Stefano Dionisi)

In the eighteenth century, at the time of Georg Friederich Handel musician and composer of the Baroque period, the young musico, Carlo Broschi, aka Farinelli, castrated at the age of 10 in order to preserve his voice, seduces with his splendid interpretations the royal courts and the audience of the best European theaters, singing the music his brother Riccardo, the executioner of his manhood, a mediocre musician, composes especially for him.

Thanks to his charisma, talent and incredible voice, Farinelli has everything he wants: wealth, success, women. But true love is missing in his life.

Intrigues and jealousies will ruin the morbid relationship that binds the two brothers, until the tragic ending.

Photo Opera Rinaldo by Georg Friedrich Haendel

Photo Farinelli’s bedroom

Photo Opera Rinaldo by Georg Friedrich Haendel

The Italian-French-Belgian film was awarded as best foreign film at the GOLDEN GLOBE and received a NOMINATION at the OSCAR for best foreign film. The film, famous for its costumes, music and set design, received several awards and prizes. Olga Berlutti and Anne de Laugardière, received the DAVID DI DONATELLO for best costumes and a nomination for the CÉSAR. Jean-Paul Mugel and Dominique Hennequin won the CÉSAR, for best sound. The film’s CD stayed at the top of the music charts for months.

Photo Opera Rinaldo by Georg Friedrich Haendel

“Farinelli Voce Regina” is above all an extraordinary product for the sumptuous refinement of the sets designed by the Oscar winner Gianni Quaranta for which the famous set designer won both the CÉSAR and the QUALITY PRIZE, as well as the candidacy for DAVID DI DONATELLO.

“For a film like Voce regina the set designer Gianni Quaranta, with his experience, is an ideal choice. Quaranta started with eighteenth-century painting (Hogarth in particular) to play with a light that enhances people and details while leaving the background dark and reinvented the complex theatrical machines of the eighteenth century. ” (Maria Pia Fusco, La Repubblica, March 26, 1994).

With the richness of its scenes, the film reproduces the splendor of the Baroque style of 1700s Europe, the era in which it is set, while, at the same time, spreading, in a spectacular way, a chapter of the European music.