The Italian Cultural Institute of Washington, in collaboration with the European-American Cultural Foundation, presents an extraordinary evening celebrating the birth of opera and the rebirth of the Teatro San Cassiano.
This special American launch announces the visionary project to reconstruct and restore Venice’s first public opera house — inaugurated in 1637 and the birthplace of public opera.
The evening features a captivating presentation by Dr. Paul Atkin of the story, scholarship, and vision behind the reconstruction, and its impact on placing cultural patrimony at the heart of a sustainable future for Venice. Interwoven throughout, enjoy stirring performances of early opera arias — the music that sparked a global opera boom and made Venice its capital.
Be part of a moment where past and future meet, and help return a masterpiece of cultural history to the world stage. Music will be performed in collaboration with Yale “Voxtet” and The Juilliard School, featuring soprano Eden Bartholomew and theorbist Alex Vourtsanis.
📍Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street, NW
Washington, DC 20008
About Teatro San Cassiano (Venice, 1637)
In 1637, the newly reconstructed “Teatro Tron di San Cassiano” staged Benedetto Ferrari and Francesco Manelli’s opera L’Andromeda for the first time before a paying public and with it the concept of “public opera” was born. This momentous act not only changed history, but it sparked a global opera boom which would establish Venice as its capital and the Teatro San Cassiano celebrated forevermore as the world’s first public opera house: the birthplace of modern-day opera.
Almost 400 years later this legacy has been lost. Today in Venice or in Italy, no single fully-active 17th-century theatre exists. That is until now.
This project will reconstruct and thus return the Teatro San Cassiano of 1637 to Venice and, with it, restore the extraordinary spectacle of “historically-informed performances” (“HIP”) of early opera until now lost in time. This will be opera rediscovered in its original setting. This will be Venice at its exhilarating best.
The project has five clear goals:
- to reconstruct the original Teatro San Cassiano of 1637 as faithfully as modern scholarship and traditional craftsmanship will allow in order to deliver a fully functioning, dedicated and historically-informed Baroque opera house, complete with its own fully operational stage machinery, moving scene-sets, dei ex machina, special effects, candlelight and unique acoustic.
- to restore HIP early opera to Venice, both staging the great masterpieces of the 17th and 18th centuries, now, as their composers and librettists would recognise them, and recovering those great forgotten operas by the many celebrated composers and poets, until now lost in time.
- to establish a world-renowned centre for the research, exploration and staging of “HIP”, literally studying and celebrating opera through its recital on stage and in the orchestra.
- to realise a viable, self-sustaining independent opera company built on the Teatro San Cassiano legacy with significant growth opportunities to secure its long-term future.
- to deliver regeneration, impact and sustainability. By embracing its cultural heritage, but with a modern global outlook, the Teatro San Cassiano will put cultural patrimony at the heart of a sustainable future for Venice, delivering in the process the perfect blend of employment, investment and regeneration that is simply unprecedented in modern times.
