Character, with Chi-chi

Every morning at 9 o'clock during 1960, Private Jean-Pierre Ponelle of the French army reported in smock and fatigues to an art studio on the military compound at Baden-Baden. Shortly afterward, his commander, General Paul Vanuxem, appeared and watched for hours as Ponelle, a onetime student of Leger, painted a 30-foot, three-paneled canvas glorifying the French army. A few months after Ponelle finished the mammoth triptych, Vanuxem was arrested as a secret leader of the O.A.S. and jailed, winning acquittal only after a two-year fight. The painting he commissioned was installed in a Roman Catholic church on the base, and was not shown to the public for years.

Ponelle, fortunately, has had better luck with his other works. At the age of 36, he is the most sought-after set designer and director for theater and opera in Europe. Last week, at the opening of the La Scala opera season in Milan, his latest paintings hung as backdrops for his own new production of Verdi's Don Carlos. Ponelle's dark, brooding sets, painted on black velvet to emphasize the somber mood of the drama, suggested El Greco canvases come to life. The naturalistic direction he gave to the expert cast assembled by Conductor Claudio Abbado--and headed by Bulgarian Basso Nicolai Ghiaurov--gave psychological unity to Verdi's knotty tale of neuroticism and political intrigue in 16th century Spain.

Nietzsche and Freud. Both the design and the direction sought to emphasize one of Ponelle's major beliefs about Verdi: that he was just as much a psychological music dramatist as Wagner. "Verdi felt and anticipated a great deal of what was later expressed by Nietzsche and Freud," he says. "In Don Carlos, King Philip is a man burdened beyond endurance with the responsibility of preserving an empire doomed to crumble, a man trembling at the possibility that the hand of God is hidden in the Inquisition. Carlos is a neurotic suffering from a clearly delineated Oedipus complex vis-a-vis his father."

There was a time when Ponelle seemed to be more concerned with chi chi than with character. Scion of a fam ily that owns some of the best vineyards in Beaujolais, he pursued an aimless study of existentialism, political science and art history at the Sorbonne. Turning to art, Ponelle was fascinated by early 16th century French and Dutch mannerists. This influence was quite pronounced in his first theatrical sets for a 1954 Berlin production of Luigi Nono's ballet, The Red Coat. Composer Hans Werner Henze, a boyhood friend, later asked Ponelle to design a production of his opera, The Stag King. Other commissions quickly followed.

By 1959, when he was drafted into the French army at the age of 27, Ponelle had already done work for every major German opera house as well as the Paris and Vienna operas. Quick and versatile, he has designed everything from a production of Hello, Dolly! to a TV version of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio, is now talking to the Metropolitan Opera about a 1970 commission. Ponelle earns about $60,000 a year from his designs, lives with his actress wife Margit and son Pierre, 11, in a two-story villa outside Munich.

For all his success as an opera designer, Ponelle worries about the shortage of good contemporary works. "I'm preparing myself for the day when some as yet undiscovered genius will lead opera into the 21st century," he says. "What continues to intrigue me with opera is that every great opera house today is not only a place to see what happens on the proscenium, but also to feel the reassurance of sharing an emotional as well as a social experience. This can never be equaled by color TV in the living room."

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