Arnaldo Ferraguti, The Royal Conservatory of Music in Milan, from “L’Illustrazione Italiana”, February 1900. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Wednesday 19 October 2022, three days before leaving the ministry, Maria Cristina Messa signs the decrees that close a question open for decades. From 1 January 2023 seventeen higher institutes of musical studies, the former istituti musicali pareggiati, non-state music schools with state-recognised status, many of them founded and maintained for decades by municipalities, become state institutions of Higher Education in the Arts, Music and Dance. The list includes Catania and Taranto, Cremona and Modena, Livorno and Lucca, and it includes Ribera, Gallarate, Castelnovo ne’ Monti, Nocera Terinese.
Counted up, Italy’s conservatories are more numerous than people think. The Ministry of University today counts seventy-two public ones: seventy state conservatories, plus the music section of the Politecnico delle Arti in Bergamo and the state-recognised institute of Aosta, supported by the Region. ANVUR, in its report on the system, distributes them as follows: nineteen in the North-East, nineteen in the South, thirteen in the North-West, eleven in the Centre, eight on the islands. Counting detached branches, the sites reach seventy-four. Students in the 2024/25 academic year number about thirty thousand: 29,928 according to ANVUR, 30,308 according to the Ministry’s statistical office, which also counts the detached branches. A third of all those enrolled in higher arts and music education study in a conservatory.
Now Germany. The German higher music schools gathered in the Rektorenkonferenz der deutschen Musikhochschulen number twenty-four, from Hamburg to Munich, from Weimar to Freiburg. In the winter semester of 2024/25 some 23,500 students were enrolled. Germany has more than eighty million inhabitants, Italy fewer than sixty. Yet Italy has nearly three times the institutions, with only a little over a quarter more students.
The division is simple and says a great deal. An Italian conservatory has on average a little over four hundred students; a German Musikhochschule nearly a thousand. They are two different ideas of a school. The German one concentrates: few cities, large institutions, where a student orchestra forms inside the school and the classes in instrument, composition and conducting live in the same corridors. The Italian one disperses: a conservatory within reach of a regional train, often within reach of a bus, in provincial capitals and in towns of a few thousand inhabitants. The first produces critical mass, the second proximity.
Proximity is worth something concrete. A student from Ribera or Nocera Terinese can study oboe or composition without moving to Palermo or Naples, and for a family the difference is counted in rent. But dispersion has a price: with four hundred pupils divided among dozens of instruments, filling an orchestra becomes an undertaking, and each institute must nonetheless have its own director, its own board, its own offices. Seventy times. The 2023 nationalisation did not choose between the two models. It turned into state law a geography born of accumulation, city by city, and handed the ministry the task of funding all of it.
The Milan conservatory was established by a decree of 1807 and opened the following year in the cloisters of Santa Maria della Passione, where it still stands. In the list signed on 19 October 2022, beside the names of Bellini, Monteverdi, Donizetti and Mascagni, there is one that comes from farther away: at Nocera Terinese, in the province of Catanzaro, the State took on an institute named after Tchaikovsky.