The Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. Photo by Diego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
While Milan opens with Verdi, Rome opens with Stravinsky: on 27 November 2026 the Teatro dell’Opera inaugurates its season with The Rake’s Progress, Michele Mariotti on the podium and a staging by the Spaniard Rafael R. Villalobos. The coincidence that is not a coincidence is worth noting: the same title also arrives at La Scala this year. When two rival opera foundations bet on the same opera of 1951, it means the twentieth century is finally becoming repertoire in Italy too, only half a century behind the rest of Europe.
The programme, presented under the D’Annunzian title Il dolce suono mi colpì, lines up eleven titles and a few pairings of the kind that happily spark debate: Andrea Chénier entrusted to the cinematic eye of Marco Bellocchio, with Daniel Oren, in January; Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District directed by Barrie Kosky with Juraj Valčuha in May, which is a candidate for the most incandescent evening of the year; Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride in Carsen’s staging; Verdi’s Due Foscari with a ninety-year-old Pizzi and then the summer Trovatore; Lucia with the choreographer Karole Armitage directing, a curious choice for the most-sung opera in Italy.
The news that interests Melos most, however, is at the bottom of the press release: in October 2027 Rossini’s La Cenerentola, directed by Mario Martone with Mariotti on the podium, will be staged at the Teatro Valle. The opera returns, that is, to the eighteenth-century theatre where Cenerentola truly debuted in 1817: a homecoming after two hundred and ten years, and the reopening to opera of a hall that Rome has let sleep too long. It is exactly the kind of gesture this magazine has always asked for: historic theatres as workshops, not as backdrops for photographs. Completing the picture are two concert performances, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and a Barbiere, the ballets with Swan Lake in December and Mahler’s Third choreographed by Neumeier, and coverage of contemporary work entrusted to the Teatro Nazionale. Sources: official presentation of the 2026/27 season, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, June 2026.