ITALIAN director and pianist Rosetta Cucchi is in Sydney to make her directorial debut for Opera Australia with Francesco Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur”, and she’s known as a true original.

Celebrated for her radical approach to staging, she also loves to raise eyebrows by declaring her fondness for Mozart’s libidinous Don Giovanni – not for his bed-hopping adventures, but for the complexity of his character, much underrated by commentators in her view.

When I catch up with Cucchi by phone to Sydney, she’s deep in production.

“I’m still a pianist,” she says, “I play with a lot of singers, but it’s some point I decided my perfect place was the stage – in opera, the perfect art form.

“In 2000 I stepped up to be a director, and I, but I never lost the musical side for the director of an opera music is extremely important, teamwork is important… conductor Leonardo Sini and I work together.”

The opera is a remount of the version staged by Teatro Comunale di Bologna and Fundación Opera de Óviedo in 2021, and while not a first for Australia, is a rare event, placing enormous demands on the singer of the title role, Adriana, in this case Albanian dramatic soprano Ermonela Jaho.

“It’s a very beautiful opera and Cilea was a great composer,” Cucchi tells me. So great in fact that while at least two sets of others are the composers and librettists had a go at the story, only Cilea’s remains.

“Dramaturgically, it’s a gift to a director, because it talks about the theatre and the idea beneath it is the theatre,” she says, noting that Adrienne Lecouvreur was a real actress in the 1730s at the Comédie-Française in Paris, who died of poison in 1732, although disappointingly, not by kissing poisoned violets, as the opera suggests.

Apart from the theatrical motif, the theme is of two powerful women opposed to each other, Adriana is the kind of lyric soprano who can play Puccini’s Mimi. Her opposite number, the Princess, Romanian Carmen Topciu is a mezzo-soprano, vocally consistent with her role as “the mean person”.

But lest stereotyping prevail, she notes, Italian baritone Giorgio Caoduro plays the good guy, Michonnet, honourable, though to be sure American tenor Michael Fabiano is the love interest, Maurizio.

Cucchi rejects the idea that the plot of “Adriana Lecouvreur” is complicated and believes that audiences will be immediately intrigued, as she is, by the opening scene showing the backstage of a theatre while a performance is going on.

The character of Adriana herself, the self- acknowledged slave to art, becomes entangled in a moderately complicated love triangle because her paramour Maurizio is also the Princess’s hidden lover, but Rosetta’s seen much more confusing plots in opera.

You might imagine that very sophisticated acting is demand it, but it’s fairly simple for Cucchi, who tells me: “I like to engage the singers and then I can achieve what I want from them… they have to trust you. If they don’t, they will do the job, but without soul.”

As for her radical vison, she says: “If we want to have an audience in the future, we need to make the operas tell us something, but without going too far from the music.”

To this end, she and her designers, Tiziano Santi and Claudia Pernigotti, have decided to vary the setting so that each act takes place in a different era, from the 18th century to the 1960s.

Act I is backstage at the Comédie-Française in the historical setting, Act II, in a villa on the Seine, is more romantic, full of hidden secrets, Act III is set in a kind of a Weimar-style cabaret, with touch of Garbo, and Act IV in room is set in in Paris during 1968, with a nod to the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard.

It sounds visually spectacular, but to Rosetta, in the end  the music is at the heart of it.

“Adriana Lecouvreur”, Opera Australia, Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, February 20-March 7.