Teatro La Fenice, Venice. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The first season signed by the new superintendent, Nicola Colabianchi, opens with a choice from another era: La Fenice launches on 13 November 2026 with Umberto Giordano’s Fedora, absent from Venice since 1968. Direction by Hugo de Ana, Donato Renzetti on the podium, Maria Agresta in the title role: the bourgeois melodrama of murder, letter and poison, brought back to the lagoon after almost sixty years.
It is the first sign of a season built on absences filled, which is a smart way to put together a programme when the repertoire’s league table has frozen: Janáček’s Jenůfa, one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century theatre, returns after eighty-five years, having been missing since 1941, directed by David Alden; Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel reappears after more than thirty years; and two titles have never played here at all: Smareglia’s Nozze istriane, Adriatic verismo ripe for rediscovery, and Handel’s Partenope, which brings theatrical Baroque to a programme that usually ignores it. Around them, the pillars that hold up the box office: Norma, Carmen, a Butterfly directed by Àlex Rigola, Adriana Lecouvreur, Morassi’s Barbiere, plus five evenings of dance.
Two observations from Melos. The first: a theatre that brings Jenůfa and Smareglia back to the stage is doing exactly the work we ask of museums when they cannot be workshops, that is, rotating the display cases, opening up the storerooms, reminding the public that the repertoire is wider than its ranking. The second is a note of realism that Venetian readers will appreciate: subscription prices, the theatre has announced, are not changing. At a time when opera complains about an ageing audience, holding the entrance threshold steady while taking risks on repertoire is the right combination, and it should be said when it happens. Sources: official presentation of the 2026/27 season, Teatro La Fenice, June 2026.