by the Melos Chorus, technical-scientific committee
James Gillray, “The Pic-Nic Orchestra,” 1802. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
This month we have covered, one by one, the 2026/27 seasons of the great theatres and the great orchestras: Scala, Santa Cecilia, Opera di Roma, Fenice, San Carlo, Regio di Torino, Maggio. Now we do what press releases never do: we count the living.
The count is quickly done, on the announced opera titles. At La Scala, thirteen titles: a single living composer on the bill, John Adams, with an opera written forty years ago. In Rome, eleven titles plus the Teatro Nazionale: the works by living composers sit in the small hall, with a world premiere, and the main stage opens at least with Stravinsky. In Naples, the most interesting gesture of the year, Debussy’s Usher completed by the living Alessandro Solbiati. In Venice, Turin and Florence, out of some thirty titles in all, the composers still breathing can be counted on the fingers of a maimed hand. In aggregate: on the great Italian stages, in the 2026/27 season, music by living people occupies around five per cent of the opera titles, and almost never on opening night. Spoken theatre, by law, has to do more; cinema would have gone bankrupt a century ago with these proportions; even museums buy contemporary art.
We know the reasons, and they are not stupid: the box office, the risk, an audience that trusts what it has already heard, the museum Toscanini left us as an inheritance. But the consequence is an absolute historical oddity: we are the first era, in the history of this art, in which the current repertoire does not contain the present. Verdi shared the programme with his contemporaries, verismo was born of a competition for beginners, and Turandot, the youngest of the mass-audience operas, has turned a hundred. If the flow does not restart, in a century the seasons will be identical to today’s, and that should frighten, first of all, those who love the dead: because yesterday’s great repertoire was the contemporary music of its day, and a system that produces no future classics is exhausting its own mine.
We set out the proposals, in black and white, in The Opera of the Living: gradual quotas, a fund for commissions and revivals, a festival that does for opera what Sanremo does for song. Here we add only a practical invitation to the reader: this year, within your subscription, pick at least one evening of music written by someone who could read you. Not out of charity: out of curiosity, which is the reason all the rest of the programme exists. The dead, trust us, will not mind. They were alive too, back when it truly counted.