ARTISTIC VANDALISM : ZEFFIRELLI’S ‘SWAN LAKE’ BY LA SCALA BALLET IN S.F.

There was a time when Italians utterly dominated the ballet world and when Milan, in particular, produced star ballerinas of incomparable emotional power and technical brilliance.

Indeed, though the language of ballet is French, the very word ballerina reminds us of how completely the concept of the female dancer has been an Italian creation. The great roles of the Romantic and classical repertory--Giselle, La Sylphide, Swanilda, Aurora, Raymonda, Odette-Odile (in St. Petersburg) and the Sugar Plum Fairy--were all originated by Italians, most of them alumni of the Teatro alla Scala, a Milanese institution that proved equally influential in the development of 19th-Century opera.

In the unorthodox La Scala Ballet “Swan Lake” that opened Wednesday at the War Memorial Opera House, this tradition of distinguished female dancing was doubly honored by the Odile of Carla Fracci (still an artist of remarkable intensity and secure technique one month before her 50th birthday) and the Odette of Oriella Dorella (a young dancer of exceptional lyric purity).

Unfortunately, they and their noble if callow Siegfried (guest artist Jean-Charles Gil) were overwhelmed by a production that revived another tradition from La Scala’s 208-year history: a dedication to grandiose middlebrow spectacle.

There were endless cloud, water, smoke, vortex and fire effects--including a bonfire on wheels--plus an enormous Gothic pulpit arising from beneath the stage four or five times during the ballet. There were also devils flapping their slimy hairy bat wings, troops of locally recruited extras in fake beards cramming every corner of the stage, swan-maidens languishing in dresses of browns and blues--but no feathers--and mammoth operatic tableaux that left little space for dancing.

This was indubitably, as the posters proclaimed, “FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI’S SWAN LAKE,” and it certainly matched in scale and taste the distorted, overblown opera productions Zeffirelli has created in recent years for stage and screen. Zeffirelli did not actually choreograph any dancing--he left that task to Rosella Hightower--but he radically revised the scenario for the ballet (with Jann Parri) and designed the scenery.

His new action plan makes Odile a constant presence in the ballet, a vampish Carmen (or Amneris) figure forever competing for Siegfried with Dorella’s Micaela (or Aida)-like Odette and sometimes mirroring her. Benno (the boyish, technically uneven Bruno Vescovo) also gains new prominence--as a leading dancer in the bravura passages of the birthday party scene and as a participant in the drama of the ballroom scene, where he is stabbed to death by Rothbart.

Rothbart himself (Tiziano Mietto) becomes positively Satanic--bathed in red light and followed by a retinue of monsters--and likewise Siegfried’s foolish tutor (the energetic Paolo Podini) represents a crude caricature of the way the role is interpreted in traditional stagings.

With their dancing demons and heavy-handed special effects, Zeffirelli’s new prologue and epilogue are pretentious but largely incoherent attempts to underscore the metaphysical implications of the work--and his staging of the most familiar episodes in the ballet resorts to florid, silent film-style emoting at odds with the economy of classical dancing.

His design concepts can be striking--especially the ballroom scene in which the various national dances add the only splash of color to a court otherwise rendered in muted tones of white, gray and silver. But his backdrops in the style of symbolist paintings, the sawtooth-edge cellophane wing units, the veristic pantomime, the fragments of the imperishable Petipa-Ivanov choreography, the problematic new dances by Hightower and the re-sequenced Tchaikovsky score absolutely failed to cohere.

There is no real vision in this “Swan Lake” to unify it, even as a radical reinterpretation. Indeed, it merely replaces ballet cliches with those from other media and pushes them to the limit--as if they were archetypes.

It doesn’t matter so much that Zeffirelli’s version has no Black Swan or White Swan (both Odile and Odette wear pale blue). It does matter that the ankle-length shifts and gowns that costume designer Anna Anni devised to replace the traditional tutus blur the women’s extensions and line. An arabesque doesn’t count for much when hidden in all that yardage.

Worse, Zeffirelli doesn’t seem to understand choreography as more than an incidental diversion--the large-scale dance sequences in this “Swan Lake” are so crammed with spear carriers and other supers, so overloaded with gestural freight and so hampered by extraneous processions that they scarcely make any effect at all.

Nor does the score. Every staging of “Swan Lake” leaves out some music and transfers other selections to new episodes. However Lorin Maazel’s wholesale cuts, transpositions and interpolations set a new standard of arrogance.

Conductor Michel Sasson compounds the injury by going for speed and volume, nothing else.

Racing through Hightower’s arbitrary and often unmusical dances, the La Scala forces display decent training and a warm elegant company style. But they cannot supply the integrity that this “Swan Lake” lacks and cannot make it anything other than the expression of a jaded and uncomprehending sensibility, 2 1/2 hours of artistic vandalism.