La Scala

The first buildings given over to opera in Milan were the court theatres that followed one another in the courtyard of the Palazzo Reale: a hall named for Margherita of Austria-Styria, wife of Philip III of Spain, raised in 1598 and destroyed by fire on 5 January 1708, and then the Regio Ducal Teatro, built in 1717 at the expense of the Milanese nobility to a design by Gian Domenico Barbieri. Those stages commissioned work from Gluck and Paisiello, and from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose Mitridate, re di Ponto and Lucio Silla were written for them. In February 1776, after a carnival gala, fire destroyed the Regio Ducale in its turn.

Ninety wealthy Milanese who owned private boxes in the burnt theatre wrote to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Este asking for a new house, and for a provisional one to use while it was being finished. The Milanese patrician families that asked for the new theatre were led by Giangiacomo Durini, count of Monza, who had been superintendent of the Regio Ducale, and they undertook to carry the cost of the new building in exchange for renewed ownership of their boxes. The theatre went ahead under a decree of the Empress Maria Theresa. The neoclassical architect Giuseppe Piermarini produced a first design, which Count Firmian, governor of Austrian Lombardy, rejected; a second plan was accepted in 1776. Piermarini also drew the Teatro Interinale, the temporary house put up beside the church of San Giovanni in Conca, and the Teatro della Cannobiana, smaller and meant for more popular entertainment.

The site chosen was the church of Santa Maria della Scala, from which the theatre took its name; the church had taken its own from its founder, Regina della Scala, of the Scaligeri of Verona. It was deconsecrated and pulled down, the demolition beginning on 5 August 1776, and over the next two years the building was completed by Pietro Marliani, Pietro Nosetti and Antonio and Giuseppe Fe. The first acoustic tests were held on 28 May 1778. On 3 August the Nuovo Regio Ducal Teatro alla Scala opened with three thousand places, in the presence of the governor Archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg-Este, of Maria Beatrice d'Este, Count Carlo Giuseppe di Firmian and Duke Francesco III d'Este, and with the first performance anywhere of Antonio Salieri's L'Europa riconosciuta, to a libretto by the abate Mattia Verazi.

The cost of the building was met by the sale of the boxes, which their owners decorated lavishly, impressing visitors such as Stendhal. In the fashion of the time the main floor had no chairs and the audience watched standing, with the orchestra in full view because no pit had yet been dug. The stalls were often given over to dancing, the boxes were used by their owners to receive guests, eat and conduct their social lives, and gambling went on in the ridotto and in a room level with the fifth tier of boxes; the impresario Domenico Barbaja introduced roulette there in 1805. Play had been strictly forbidden in the city from 1788, with the single exception of the theatres during performances, and La Scala worked as a casino as well as a stage, with gamblers sitting in the foyer.

The politics of the age reached the theatre's calendar directly. It closed on 20 February 1790 for the death of the Emperor Joseph II and again on 1 March 1792 for the death of Leopold II; on 15 May 1796 it gave the first performance there of Rouget de Lisle's Chant de guerre de l'armée du Rhin; and on 24 March 1799 the Directory abolished the royal box. The seasons of spring and summer 1807 moved to the Canobbiana while the interior decoration was redrawn in neoclassical taste, and in 1814 the stage was enlarged to a design by Luigi Canonica after the demolition of neighbouring buildings, among them the convent of San Giuseppe. A great chandelier carrying eighty-four oil lamps, designed by the scenographer Alessandro Sanquirico, was hung at the centre of the ceiling in 1823, to complaints that it lit the hall too well and let indiscreet eyes into the privacy of the boxes.

Through the Austrian and French years the house was financed by the gaming income and by the same families who had wanted it built and kept their hold on it through their shares in the boxes. The first three tiers stayed in aristocratic hands for many years, while the fourth and fifth were largely occupied by the upper middle class, which came into the theatre in force from the 1820s; in the stalls, and still more in the gallery, the public mixed soldiers, young aristocrats, middle-class citizens and artisans. Formal charge of the management remained with the Milanese nobility, but the running of the seasons was almost always given to professional impresarios: Angelo Petracchi from 1816 to 1820, Barbaja from 1826 to 1832, Bartolomeo Merelli from 1836 to 1850, and the brothers Ercole and Luciano Marzi from 1857 to 1861. Their hardest task was holding the attention of an audience busy with other things in the boxes, or put off by the noise from gaming tables open from midday until evening. Mary Shelley found as much in September 1840, when Otto Nicolai's Templario was being given: the theatre served, she wrote, "not only as the universal drawing-room for all the society of Milan" but as a place where "every sort of trading transaction, from horse-dealing to stock-jobbing, is carried on in the pit".

From September 1812, with the success of Rossini's La pietra del paragone under Alessandro Rolla, La Scala became the appointed home of Italian melodramma. Niccolò Paganini gave violin concerts there in the autumn of 1813 and, on 29 October, the first performance of his Le streghe. Rossini's La gazza ladra had its first performance in the house in 1817, again conducted by Rolla, and the 1820s brought the operas of Saverio Mercadante, of Gaetano Donizetti, who arrived in October 1822 with Chiara e Serafina, and above all of the Sicilian Vincenzo Bellini, whose Il pirata succeeded in October 1827. Behind the choices lay the publisher Ricordi, whose privilege first as copyist and then as publisher of the works given at La Scala, together with the theatre's manuscript archive he had bought in 1825, gave him a strong hand in deciding which composers were asked for revivals and new productions.

Giuseppe Verdi made his debut at the house in November 1839 with Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio, an opera in the Donizettian mould but with dramatic peculiarities of his own, which pleased the public. On the strength of it Merelli commissioned the comedy Un giorno di regno, which failed disastrously, and it was Merelli again who talked him out of abandoning opera by putting Temistocle Solera's biblical libretto for Nabucco into his hands. It reached the stage on 9 March 1842 to a lukewarm welcome, but from the revival of 13 August the success was overwhelming, carried in part by the patriotic feeling it stirred in a city where the Risorgimento was beginning to ferment. The staging of Giovanna d'Arco in 1845 ended the partnership: resentment at how little weight the Scala impresarios gave to a composer's wishes against their own, chiefly financial, needs pushed Verdi to give up the stage that had launched him for more than twenty years, and he also objected that some of his music had been altered, or as he put it corrupted, by the orchestra. After the Austrian withdrawal in 1859 the theatre resumed with Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, and King Vittorio Emanuele II attended the performance of 9 August; with unification the municipality took over from the Austrian government in subsidising the theatre.

Reassured by Tito Ricordi and his son Giulio, Verdi returned in 1869 with a revised La forza del destino billed as staged by the author. He gave the European premiere of Aida in the house in 1872 under Franco Faccio, conducted his Requiem there on 25 May 1874, and oversaw the new version of Simon Boccanegra in 1881 and the four-act Italian Don Carlo in 1884. In 1886 he announced that La Scala would have the premiere of what became his penultimate opera, Otello, given under Faccio in 1887, and the first performance of his last opera, Falstaff, followed in 1893 under Edoardo Mascheroni. Wagner had reached the Scala stage in 1873 with Lohengrin, conducted by Faccio, and Amilcare Ponchielli's La Gioconda had its first performance in 1876. Between 1894 and 1897 the management passed to the publisher Edoardo Sonzogno, and the seasons filled with French composers and with the so-called verismo school. Electric light was installed in 1883 through a connection to the nearby Santa Radegonda power station, and in 1891 standing places were abolished and the first fixed seats put into the stalls. On 1 July 1897 the city council, facing social emergencies and pressed by the parties of the left, suspended its contribution, and the theatre was forced to close from 7 December, its singing and dancing schools with it.

The house reopened on 26 December 1898 with Die Meistersinger under Arturo Toscanini, through the munificence of Guido Visconti di Modrone, who made good the losses from his own funds and founded a joint-stock company, taking its presidency and naming Arrigo Boito his deputy; Giulio Gatti Casazza took the general direction and Toscanini the artistic one. Giacomo Puccini had made his own debut there on 21 April 1889 with Edgar, to a cordial rather than a warm reception, and the first performance of Madama Butterfly in 1904 was a resounding failure. Before staging the works of dead composers Toscanini put them through an unusual cleaning, restoring passages that had been cut or rewritten in the orchestration; his work on Il trovatore, staged on 9 February 1902, met a flat refusal from the publisher Giulio Ricordi, who held the rights to the libretto and judged the intervention arbitrary, and only Boito's mediation allowed him to finish it. Toscanini left on 14 April 1903, during a revival of Un ballo in maschera, after falling out with the Milanese public; among his other reasons were friction with Uberto Visconti di Modrone, who had succeeded his father Guido that year, a salary well below what the singers were paid, and above all his conception of the conductor as the controlling mind of the whole performance.

Gatti Casazza stayed until 1907, when he had the stage drawn back to make room for the pit; until then the players and the conductor performed in front of the audience, often blocking the view from the stalls. The auditorium was reworked in 1907 into the layout it has kept, with 1,987 seats, and in 1909 the fifth tier of boxes was turned into the present first gallery so that more people who owned no box could attend. At the end of 1918 Visconti di Modrone had to give up the charge for financial reasons, and after a two-year deadlock the box-holders and the city both renounced their rights of ownership; the Ente Autonomo Teatro alla Scala was founded in their place under the general director Angelo Scandiani, funded by municipal and state subsidy and by a public subscription promoted by the Corriere della Sera. Scandiani formally constituted the theatre's own orchestra, about a hundred players chosen by strict audition and engaged on permanent contracts, with Toscanini again directing the music alongside Ettore Panizza. In 1929 the Fascist state reserved the appointment of the Ente's president to the head of government and imposed a representative of the Ministry of National Education on the board; Toscanini finished the tour to Vienna and Berlin, left the direction of the theatre in May of the following year and moved to New York, and in 1931, after being attacked in Bologna and slapped in front of the Teatro Comunale for refusing to play the Marcia reale and Giovinezza, he left the country for good. On 26 December 1938 the chorus master Vittore Veneziani was forced out of La Scala under the Fascist racial laws.

Immediately after the fall of Fascism, on 25 July 1943, posters calling for Toscanini's return appeared on the walls of the theatre. The Allied raid of 8 August left light damage only, the air-protection staff putting out incendiary fragments that had fallen on the roof, but on the night of 15 to 16 August an incendiary bomb exploded on the roof and wrecked the auditorium, bringing down the ceiling and destroying the boxes of the upper tiers, and the stage was spared only because the metal safety curtain had been lowered; raids in the following days struck the museum and the via Filodrammatici side. "We could only weep", recalled the theatre's set designer Nicola Benois, who said that since the beginning of the war they had been putting on shows for soldiers and the wounded, and that the great new wounded one was now La Scala. On the initiative of the culture assessor Achille Magni, with the assent of the mayor Antonio Greppi, it was settled that the theatre would be rebuilt as it had been and where it had been before the war, under an extraordinary commissioner, Antonio Ghiringhelli, with the work led by the city's chief engineer Luigi Lorenzo Secchi. It ran until May 1946, and music continued in the meantime at Como and Bergamo and, in Milan, at the Teatro Lirico, where Veneziani returned as chorus master on 13 December 1945. At nine o'clock "precisely", as the bill had it, on 11 May 1946, Toscanini, twice the theatre's principal conductor and an associate of both Verdi and Puccini, inaugurated the rebuilt hall with a programme drawn from Rossini, Verdi, Puccini and Boito, a soprano solo by Renata Tebaldi creating a sensation; opera returned on 26 December with Nabucco.

Ghiringhelli, made superintendent in 1948, presided over a house divided between the supporters of Maria Callas and of Renata Tebaldi; Callas, who had already stepped in for her colleague in performances of Aida in 1950, had her first Scala triumph opening the 1951 to 1952 season as the Duchess Elena in I vespri siciliani under Victor de Sabata. On 18 February 1957 the theatre remembered Toscanini, who had died in New York that January, with a concert under de Sabata. A law of summer 1967 recognised La Scala as an autonomous lyric body with legal personality under public law, with the mayor of the city as president of its board and the superintendent proposed by the city council and appointed by the responsible minister. Paolo Grassi, one of the founders of the Piccolo Teatro, became superintendent in 1972, the year Claudio Abbado was named music director, and under that management the house reached its greatest output, staging close to three hundred performances a year. Abbado founded the Filarmonica della Scala in 1982 on the model of the Vienna Philharmonic, drawing its players from the larger pool of the Orchestra della Scala to build a symphonic repertoire beside the operatic one. Riccardo Muti succeeded him in 1986 and brought back neglected works by Cherubini and Gluck, and Carlo Fontana, superintendent from 1990, pushed the house into foreign touring.

In 1996 the Italian state, the Region of Lombardy and the city of Milan constituted by law the Fondazione Teatro alla Scala, a non-profit foundation under private law charged with spreading and teaching music, training artistic and technical staff, and musical research and production. From January 2002 to December 2004 the building was closed for its deepest restoration since the end of the Second World War, the stage entirely rebuilt and the backstage enlarged so that more sets could be stored. The company gave its last performances with the Otello that opened the season on 7 December 2001, and from 19 January 2002 it played at the new Teatro degli Arcimboldi, built in the former Pirelli area of Bicocca some seven kilometres from the centre of Milan. The renovation, by the architect Mario Botta, was contested by conservationists who feared the loss of historic detail, though the company was satisfied with the result and with the sound, which improved once the heavy red carpets were taken out of the hall. The house returned to the public on 7 December 2004 with the opera written for its inauguration in 1778, Salieri's L'Europa riconosciuta, conducted by Muti, with tickets fetching up to 2,000 euros; the work cost a reported 61 million euros and left a shortfall the theatre made good in 2006.

Fontana was dismissed in February 2005 over differences with Muti, the staff answered with strikes and a motion of no confidence in the conductor on 16 March, and Muti resigned on 2 April, citing hostility from members of the staff. Stéphane Lissner, formerly head of the Aix-en-Provence festival, was appointed in May 2005, the first non-Italian to hold the office. Daniel Barenboim, who opened the season of 7 December 2007 with Tristan und Isolde, was named music director in 2011, holding the post alongside the Berlin State Opera, and Riccardo Chailly succeeded him on 1 January 2015. Lissner left for the Paris Opera and was followed as superintendent by Alexander Pereira from 1 October 2014 and by Dominique Meyer in 2020, and in 2023 Paolo Conte became the first singer-songwriter to perform in the theatre. The house is owned by the municipality of Milan, has been run since 1996 by the Fondazione Teatro alla Scala, and carries Italian national heritage protection. Its season opens every year on 7 December, the feast of Saint Ambrose, the patron saint of Milan, and performances must end before midnight, with long operas starting earlier in the evening when necessary. Above the boxes the gallery known as the loggione, where those with less money watch, holds the theatre's most exacting followers: in 2006 the tenor Roberto Alagna was booed during a performance of Aida, left the stage and did not return to the production. The Museo Teatrale alla Scala, reached from the foyer and part of the house itself, holds paintings, statues, costumes and documents on the history of the theatre and of opera.