Pure theater as Venice acts to recreate first opera house

Residents of Venice, famed for its canal network and artistic treasures, are used to enduring the batterings of high tides and flooding, but this year they had barely recovered from that before the Veneto region found itself becoming one of the hot spots of Italy's devastating novel coronavirus outbreak.

After four months of suffering, the country is coming out of lockdown, and a beacon of hope is being offered by the restoration of a lost Venetian cultural jewel that could soon be back on the map, as plans are afoot to recreate the world's first public opera house, Teatro San Cassiano, which opened in 1637.

The opening of the opera house led to the art form gaining mass popularity, but in 1812, the theater was demolished, meaning there are now no professionally active opera houses from the baroque period anywhere in the world.

Recreating it is the dream of British musicologist Paul Atkin, who was inspired by a similar project at Shakespeare's Globe theater in London, which has been a critical and commercial success.

"Cultural exchange always leads the way in international relations, and in that era there were few places in the world as important as Venice," Atkin said.

"It was the entry point into Europe for Chinese traders as the end of the Silk Road; it's the home of Marco Polo, one of Europe's greatest explorers, and every modern opera house is descended from San Cassiano. What the Globe means to London and Shakespeare, this means to Venice and opera."

Opera became popular in the 16th century but only for the elite, until commercially-minded theater owners in Venice rebuilding San Cassiano decided to make it suitable for opera as well as theater performances, changing music history.

"The first opera staged there, Francesco Manelli's L'Andromeda in 1637, was so popular that by the end of the century Venice alone had 11 opera houses," Atkin said. "But as opera grew more popular, theaters got bigger and the intimacy was lost. That's what we're bringing back."

Having recreated the blueprints from later architectural drawings, Atkin thinks his team have made the theater as close to the original as possible.

Bring history back

"We've pulled it from the grave," he said. "You can't get everything right, but musically and historically, it'll be as close an experience as possible to how it was originally.

"The capacity will be just 405, then five tiers of boxes, with six singers on stage at any one time, and eight musicians. When you hear it like that, the experience will be closer to how it was envisaged by composers and musicians at the time.

"When I started, the locals thought 'who is this crazy Englishman?' but as it's gone on, they've seen it isn't just a project for Venice, it's with Venice. Whenever possible, we use local people, even to design our website and print our publicity material, and the local builders know what they're doing."

Days before the novel coronavirus hit the city, the project took a meaningful step forward which gives Atkin a real sense of post-lockdown optimism.

"Finally we had a meeting with the mayor's office that we'd been working up to for three years, and his chief of staff made it very clear they back the project and gave us a letter of endorsement," he said.

"If Venice says it wants something to happen, it will happen. In Italy, it's not about the detailed legislation, it's about the will. We think we can deliver this now, and it will be beyond our dreams."