Stuff You Missed in History ClassThis 2014 episode covers the Teatro alla Scala, one of the most renowned opera houses in the world. It's Italy's crown jewel of the arts, and even if you have only a passing knowledge of opera, odds are, you know a name connected to the history of this legendary cultural hub.
Happy Saturday. La Scala Opera House opened its doors on August third, seventeen seventy eight, or two hundred and forty six years ago today. If you're listening on drop Day, so our episode on the Opera House is Today's Saturday Classic. This originally came out on August eleventh, twenty fourteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly from and I'm Tracy Wilson. Tracy question, Yes, do you're like opera? I would like to like opera, right, Well, I love opera, but I'm always a little bit reticent to verbalize that to people that know a lot about opera, because what often happens is that they're then like excited and off again, wanting to talk about like different performances and you know, some very technical things, and I'm kind of like, no, I just like to listen to it. But I'm not really what you would call an opera scholar, even on the most mild degree. But I really enjoy it.
And there are a lot of aspects of opera that are actually in our daily lives, and we don't even know about, and today we're going to talk about a very famous opera house that has a legacy that touches Probably anyone hearing this is life, whether they realize it or not. If you grew up watching Bugs Bunny, if you grew up watching television or film, you have heard some of the work that came out of this sort of hotbed of you know, really amazing cultural development. I will make a brief aside about how one of them got involved in my wedding, sort of when we get to that part and we're talking about the La Scala opera house, the tetro A La Scala, which is one of the most renowned opera houses in all the world. It is Italy's crown jewel of the arts. Really, But as I said, even if you only have a passing knowledge of opera, or really you don't think you have any knowledge of opera, odds, are you know a name or two connected to the history of this legendary place, Because it's one of those amazing icons that really actually touches and sort of ties together a lot of different pieces of history on the timeline. So there are things that you may not associate with opera that will kind of get connected here, so we will start with how it got built in the first place. On February twenty sixth, seventeen seventy six, the Royal Ducal Theater burned to the ground in a fire. Since the theater had really been the heart of opera in Milan, they needed to build a replacement, and at the time, the Royal House of Austria was actually ruling over Milan and Empress Maria Theresa spearheaded this plan to replace this lost cultural landmark. And again to place Maria Theresa in context, she was the mother of the famed Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, as well as the mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold the Second. She had many many other children and really kind of populated the way a lot of royal houses throughout Europe. So that's the first person.
Who's kind of connected to this that you might not have known about. The architect chosen for the task of designing the new opera house was Giuseppe Pimerini. Pimerini is now considered one of the great Neoclassical architects, and he was no stranger to high profile gigs. He had also worked on the Royal Palace of Milan, as well as the Maria Teresa Hall of the Brudenci National Library, also in Milan, and the cost of construction for this new theater was funded by the people who had actually already owned private boxes in the destroyed Dukyle Theater, and in return these donors got renewed ownership of their boxes, so in the new theater they would once again have a box, as well as partial ownership of the land where the theater was built. And prior to the theater going up, the Church of Santa Maria Alascala had been standing on that land and had to be demolished to make way for the new facility, and the name Lascala was retained as a way to kind of honor that church. It took a little more than two years to build the new building, and on August third, seventeen seventy eight, Milan's new opera house, Teatro ela Scala, which translates to the Theater at the Stairway, opened its doors. The first opera performed there was Antonio Salieri's Europa Revealed. Mattia Varazzi wrote the libretto, which centers on the story of Zeus's former lover Europa. The plot begins with Europa being kidnapped but just before her wedding and forced into marriage with the King of Crete. After lots of dramatic twists and turns, Europa is placed on the throne of Tire, although she quickly turns over the seat of power to Esao and his new love Semila after she performs their marriage and so Lescala continued to offer operatic performances to great success for many years. So again that was late seventeen hundreds when it reopened its doors, when it opened its doors to replace the previous theater. But then in the early eighteen hundreds there were several developments that happened that really sort of changed the complexion of La Scala's artistic offerings and their focus. First, in eighteen twelve, an opera by Joachino Rossini debuted and it was called The Touchstone. It was the story of love tested by multiple suitors, with a libretto that was written by Luigi Romanelli. This sparked a move to what's called opera syria or serious opera, and the style focuses more on the solo voice and belcanto or beautiful singing, although that's not what it was called until a whole lot later. To explain volcanto, will quote New York Times music writer Anthony Thomassini, who wrote the following in two thousand and eight. In its narrowest sense, belcanto opera refers to the early decades of nineteenth century Italian opera, when Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti dominated the field, but the overall concept of valcanto started much earlier, with a consensus among opera enthusiasts that there was nothing more ravishing than a beautiful voice singing a beautiful melodic line beautifully, especially a melodic line driven by sensitive musical setting of a poetic and singable text.
So whereas prior.
Operas had really included more chorus and orchestra elements, this style kind of put those in the background. It favored a single exquisite voice for pieces of performance, and Rossini's opera was instantly successful, and it was performed dozens of times over the course of its run. With Opera Siria now at the forefront of Milan's apera culture, Rossini had lots of additional works performed at La Scala over the next thirteen years. These included Il Turco and Italia or The Turk in Italy, his version of Cinderella Il Barbieri de Sevilia or The Barber of Seville, which you're familiar with if you've watched lots of books, Bunny and Otello, among others. So as a brief aside, I will tell you that The Rabbit of Seville is my absolute favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon of all time. I also love What's Opera Doc, But in the opera arena, the Rabbit of Seville just works for me, largely because of all of the great Charlie Chaplin callbacks they do so much. So that is still from that cartoon is what was on my wedding invitations. That's what I'm saying.
So I owe a little bit to Rossini there. The other significant development for La Scala during this time was the staging of several ballets by Salvadore Vegano and Carlo Blasi. And Vigano shifted the focus of ballet to a narrative style with his choreography. In this case, the dance told a story in one arc, rather than just being a series of sort of well staged movements. His choreo drama as it came to be called, had been developed in Vienna before he debuted it to Italian audiences, and once he started having showings at Las Scala, it became very, very popular and he ended up working at the famous opera house for more than fifteen years, and during this time while he was there, he staged, among others, Otello de dalo la Vestal which is the Vestal Virgin and e Titani which is the Titans.
Carlo Blasi was a dancer and a student of Vigano, and in addition to continuing this narrative tradition of his mentor's choreography, he was also rigorous in systematizing the technique of ballet. He performed all over the world as a dancer, and he wrote his first treatise on dance while working in Milan with Le Scala in eighteen twenty. His most famous writing on the art was the Code of Terpsickory. And in addition to advancing ballet technically, Blasi also promoted the idea that artists could be cultured and familiar with all of the arts, not just their own. Yeah, he really kind of fostered this idea that any dancers were working with him needed to also be reading literature, they needed to be studying music, They needed to be really well rounded kind of Renaissance people in that regard. The work of both Vegano and Blasi established Le Scala in the world of ballet as well as the world of opera, where it had already been succeeding, and it sort of built its reputation as a theater where which just excellence prevailed amongst all manner of the arts. So during that time two particular composers became just prolific at Lascala. The first was Gaetano Donizetti, and he premiered his opera Schiara a Serafina in October of eighteen twenty two. The libretto was by Felice Romani. Because the work had just been rushed due to all kinds of problems and illnesses among the production members, the reception was mediocre. In spite of that, he continued to produce work for Lascala as well as for many other opera houses for years afterward, including an opera entitled Lucregia Borgia. He continued to serve the popularity of the belcanto style Yeah since I know we have a lot of Borgia fans in the listening audience on to make sure they knew that there's an opera about Lucrezia. The other important composer from this time is Vincenzo Bellini, and he debuted his opera Il Perata or The Pirate in eighteen twenty seven at La Scala. And Bellini's signature was really his amazing talent for writing vocal melody that's been characterized as both pure and sensuous, and his influence as apparent throughout the world of opera, following him in the works of many other famous composers, including Wagner, Chopin, and liszt So. While the entirety of La Scala is very influential, he in particular influenced several composers that came after him, Like Donizetti. Bellini was another artist who was linked to the belcanto style, although Bellini is generally believed to be the more gifted of the two in the area of vocal harmonies. Yeah, some of his work is just really beautiful to listen to you, And like I said, I you know, my knowledge of music theory and opera is very limited. But I still just am always struck by how absolutely beautiful some of these pieces are.
And then there isn't we get to a time when another really huge name that everyone will probably recognize that's attached to Lascala kind of emerges, and that is in eighteen thirty nine, Oberto Conte di San Bonifacio, the Count of San Benifescio, debuted at Lascala, and this was the first work of Giuseppe Verdi to do so, and it kicked off a very long career for him and many years of debuts by the composer at the famed Milan opera house, And in fact, Verdi is usually the most famous composer associated with Lascala. Everyone sort of recognizes his name, even if they couldn't maybe pull one of his tunes out of their memory. Verdi and Lascala became deeply linked, to a degree beyond that of any other composer. While working on his first opera, he lost his infant daughter, and the second baby that he had with his wife, a son, died roughly a year after the debut of Oberto. It said that when Verdi's wife died while he was working on his second opera and the work in Giorno di regno or King for a Day was not well received. It was the manager of Loscala at the time who urged him to continue composing and to find solace in his work instead of quitting, which he had threatened to do.
Yeah, so in that regard, Bartolomeo Merelli, who was the manager of the theater at the time, really kind of saved the creative life of Verity and impacted him in a sort of reciprocal way to the way that many of these composers were impacting the opera house. Because if he had quit, oh, we would have been robbed of some beautiful stuff. And while that second opera, Gianna d'r reno or King for a Day didn't go so well, his third work that he did after that, Nabuco, debuted in eighteen forty two, and this was really like the moment where he sort of rocketed to stardom. And that may sound like a weird phrase, but I mean, at this point, particularly in Illa, in Europe in general, but Italy especially, composers were kind of like rock stars. I mean, they were basically the celebrities of the day. And so his career really just kind of shot on an almost vertical trajectory at this point, and as a consequence, his career with Lascala lasted more than fifty years. He did retire for a little bit in the towards the end of it, and then he ended up working on his last couple of pieces as collaborations with another composer. But he sort of became famous and then stayed famous for decades working with Lascala. Perhaps his most famous opera, which was the Tale of enslaved Ethiopian Princess Aida, was rare in that it didn't premiere at Lascala. It was first presented at the Cairo Opera House in eighteen seventy one, and then it premiered at La Scala shortly afterward.
Yeah, there's a story that he did not attend the Cairo Opera House premiere, but what he heard about how it had gone did not really delight him.
It was mostly dignitaries and invite only and kind of higher echelonza society. And he really appreciated that opera was one of those things that could be appreciated by anyone, and so he really sort of considered the La Scala premiere the premier because there were people from all layers of society, not only the sort of wealthy and famous and privileged. And among the famous pieces that Verdi did debut at La Scala during his fifty year run there were Giovanna Darco, Otello and Falstaff, which was the last one. And he wrote more than two dozen operas during his career. So when you think about a fifty year career, that's an opera every couple of years, which is really quite.
Busy. I can't I certainly can't imagine doing it. But that would be like an author writing a book every two years, which some do, but very few keep up that pace. Often mentioned a second only to Verdi among Italian composers, Puccini emerged as the composer celeb of La Scala as the eighteen hundreds were ending, but he is responsible for one of the most famous, if not the most proud, incidents at the theater. In December of nineteen oh four, Jacomo Puccini debuted Madama Butterfly. Although the opening night was really something of a fiasco, and the word fiasco gets used almost every time someone writes about this particular event, it's a rather famous tale among opera enthusiasts and opera fans because it's just so crazy. And while Puccini was brimming with confidence regarding the quality of this particular work, the production itself was played with problems. As the opera was only recently completed when Puccini arrived in Milan for rehearsals, the singers got their parts only a few pages at a time. On top of that, music was not allowed.
To leave the theater, and the press was not allowed to sit in on rehearsals, which was a privilege they had enjoyed for a long time. This only served to make critics angry and predisposed to dislike the piece. And while the crowd on opening night, according to at least some witnesses, was hostile from the get go, the entrance of Butterfly is really when things started to just go south in a hurry. And remember that opera huge in Italy at the time. Crowds very familiar with the work of famous composers, and so a portion of the melody that she sang sounded to some people similar to an element from Puccini's previous work. La Boem and some members of the crowd started to call out what they felt was lazy composing, and they started yelling during the performance Boem Boem because they were trying to point out that he was sort of plagiarizing himself. At this point, the crowd became polarized between supporters and detractors, and attendees started yelling at each other in the stage so much that no one could hear the singing and during the intermetso when performers had been placed around the theater bird whistles to create this realistic soundscape of dawn breaking, Heckler's in the audience saw this bird song as their cue to make other animal noises, so they you know, started doing all kinds of other bizarre and rude noises and just basically kind of having their own little heyday with things. And the entire opera went on this way with an unruly crowd basically bent on ruining the debut. And there's some debate over sort of what really caused the sort of rabble rousing. There are some stories that say that Puccini's rivals sort of were working prior to this debut really trying to like jab at the critics and point out how poorly they had been treated in not being allowed into rehearsals and kind of stirring the pot. But others just say like there was just this general sense of distrust of the whole thing, in part because of that and because nobody had heard the music. This was again a time when it was so popular that sheet music would be sold kind of to the general public to consume, much the same way you would buy an album of a band that you were going to see before the concert happened, and none of that was allowed since the music had been held so tightly. So it was kind of just this perfect storm of people being grumpy about the premiere of Madama Butterfly. I feel like it's like Spider Man Unlock the Dark, except to the best of my knowledge, no one died in terrible stunts. No, I don't think anybody died in Spider Man. But there were some injuries, right, So the reviews were terrible. But Puccini always thought that Butterfly was his best work, and when he staged it the following year in the northern Italian city of Brescia, people created it much more warmly. It's really come to be recognized as the amazing work that it is. Sort of transcended that horrible opening, and even despite the butterfly incident, Puccini was really much loved by Italy, and when he died sometime later in nineteen twenty four, while he was working on his final opera, Torondeau, the entire country really mourned. Some will even described this as a morning that went on for a couple of years. They really felt the loss of this artist. So we've talked a lot about composers up to this point, but there have been other figures who had a significant impact on the development and direction of La Scala through the years.
Arturo Toscanini was appointed artistic director of La Scala in eighteen ninety eight, so, as you know, Verdi's stuff was wrapping up and Puccini was coming in. Toscanini was renowned as a conductor. He said to have stepped in to conduct a performance of Aida at the Rio de Genio opera House as a last minute fill in when he was only nineteen, and he performed the entire opera from memory. He had a wonderful memory that apparently served him very well as he got older, because he lost his eyesight and had to start conducting exclusively memory but in terms of his leadership role at Lascala, he completely reorganized the entire structure of the theater, both from an artistic and an administrative perspective. He restaged many of the works of the opera house's most famous composers, and his interpretations reinvigorated a lot of pieces for the public ear He's said to have been able to pull the finest playing from the orchestra. He also brought the performance of symphonic works into Lascala's performance calendar, which allowed the orchestra to be the star instead of the singers. Yeah, similar to how you know, the choreographers had kind of expanded Lascala's repertoire to include ballet. He really expanded it by not only staging operas but also just huge symphonies. And then in more recent years, Lascala has had some off stage drama to contend with. At the end of two thousand and one, the theater concluded its run of Otello and it temporarily closed its doors for a pretty significant renovation. So from two thousand and two January two thousand and two to late two thousand and four, this major construction project was underway and there were really a lot of fears among Italians and even worldwide among people that were just huge fans and recognized the historic and important nature of La Scala that modernizing this facility was going to destroy some of the building's heritage. Despite the concerns, this entirely rebuilt stage let the theater perform three different shows in a single day, and the sound quality of the venue was improved when the heavy hallway carpets were taken away. Seating capacity was expanded to twoy one hundred five seats from one thousand, eight hundred, and during the restoration, a walled over fireplace was found in one of the boxes along the second level, and the boxes, which used to be privately owned, were all refurbished. Yeah, they tried to even though they were modernized a lot of stuff. They did sort of some complete kind of historical restoration type decor in some of the boxes. And on December fifth of two thousand and four, the New York Times reported that La Scala had reopened exactly on time, just a little bit over budget, and with fantastic new acoustics. So this all sounded great. The theater opened with the staging of the same opera, which had run when it first opened its doors in seventeen seventy eight Salieri's Europa Riconciuda, and tickets for this performance ran into the thousands of dollars range. People were very excited to be part of this new reopening. But just a year later, the BBC ran a story that seemed to suggest a bloomy future for the opera house. Budgets for the arts in Italy were being slashed and Lascala's future really didn't seem all that secure. In the months preceding that article, the head of the theater had been fired and the conductor of fifteen years, Ricardo Muti quit. Yeah, looked there was a while where there was a lot of head shaking and you know, sort of glowery faces and people really thinking that Lascala had finally been, you know, after two hundred years kind of run into the ground. But in fact, thankfully the theater has weathered the storm. You know, through some strong leadership and some really devoted staff. It's been able to kind of get through those rough times and put together a business plan that's kept it going. It's about to have a planned change of leadership this year, this coming October, when stefan listener who has been there for a while, is going to leave his position. He's going to the Paris Opera and Alexander Pereira is going to take over the position he comes from, I believe, an opera house in Germany. In addition to its theatrical opera productions, Lascala also still houses its ballet company, a ballet school, and a voice school. While the theater still does get a government subsidy, the operating costs are also covered by ticket sales and immuniiciple tacks.
So yeah, it is still thankfully going strong, and it's one of those things I wanted to cover because it is the artists that were sort of supported by this theater have been so impactful, and like I said, there are so many songs that you hear that you don't even realize are by composers that came out of La Scala, So it's important. Stuffs. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at Missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Club is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
