The auditorium of the Teatro Regio di Torino. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Turin’s Regio has given its 2026/27 season a title out of a novel, Fatale, and an inauguration out of a history textbook: on 15 October 2026, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, the verismo double bill par excellence, conducted by music director Andrea Battistoni with a different director for each of the two operas, Daniele Menghini and Francesco Micheli. But the real coup is what surrounds it: around the double bill, between October and November, the theatre mounts an entire Progetto Verismo, four titles in twenty-two performances, reviving Mascagni’s Iris and, a true connoisseur’s move, Leoncavallo’s Bohème: the unlucky rival, written in the same years as Puccini’s on the same subject, and worth hearing at least once in a lifetime to understand how the opera market of the late nineteenth century really worked.
The rest of the year holds to the theme of destiny with a consistency rare in Italian schedules: Puccini’s early Edgar with Carlo Rizzi, Vivaldi’s Juditha triumphans in concert form with Gianluca Capuano, a Salome entrusted to the eye of the Hungarian film director Kornél Mundruczó, Oren’s Carmen, and a Eugene Onegin signed by Robert Carsen to close in June. Ninety performances, nine new productions, thirty debuts: the numbers of a theatre in good health. In December, before opera, the stage belongs to dance, with Bolle, the Tokyo Ballet, which also brings a Rite of Spring, and a Georgian Nutcracker.
Melos’s view: the Regio, which has the most modern auditorium among Italy’s great historic theatres, the one designed by Mollino after the fire, confirms itself as the boldest in building seasons around a theme rather than a catalogue. The theme is open to debate, the method is not: a schedule that tells a story sells subscriptions better than a list. And a theatre that makes you hear the wrong Bohème to help you understand the right one is, at bottom, doing the work of a magazine. Sources: official presentation of the 2026/27 season, Teatro Regio di Torino, May 2026.