On 6 November 1946 the Associazione generale italiana dello spettacolo and the Federazione dei lavoratori dello spettacolo signed the contract for the orchestral players of La Scala, the Rome Opera, Santa Cecilia and the autonomous institutions of Florence, Genoa and Palermo. Article 21 fixed the normal working day at five hours, divided into two sessions. Article 23 laid down that the ordinary rehearsal, on performance days, last two hours, including ten minutes’ rest. From that moment the unit of measurement of Italian orchestral work has had a precise form: a hundred and twenty minutes, ten of them rest.
Eighty years on the form is almost the same. The national contract for the opera and symphonic foundations, in its 2018 text renewed up to the agreement of 13 November 2024, keeps the working hours fixed in 2000 and repeated in 2014: twenty-eight hours a week, no more than eleven sessions a week and two a day, no more than six hours a day. The sectional rehearsal lasts two hours with a ten-minute break, or two and a half hours with a quarter of an hour. The single rehearsal, in exceptional cases, runs to three and a half hours with twenty minutes’ rest, and is not extended even by paying overtime. The notice that the Fondazione Toscanini of Parma gives its players repeats the twenty-eight hours and adds the extra monthly payments: the thirteenth and the fourteenth.
Then there is the money. From 1 January 2024, with the four per cent increase signed on 30 November 2023, the contractual minimum for a second-category orchestral player is 1,828.84 euros gross a month; the concertmaster starts at 2,380.50. At the Arena di Verona the table in force since 7 October 2024 gives 1,886.91 euros to the second category. Multiplied by fourteen, the national minimum comes to about 25,600 euros gross a year. The theatre adds the social-security contributions to the fund for performing-arts workers, which for the employer amount to 23.81 per cent, and the provision for end-of-service pay, 6.91 per cent. The cost of a player at the minimum thus rises towards 33,500 euros a year.
Now the sum. Twenty-eight hours for about forty-six weeks, annual leave and public holidays deducted, make around 1,290 contractual working hours a year. A player at the minimum therefore costs about 26 euros an hour. A symphony orchestra of ninety players costs, at the minimum, about 2,340 euros an hour: more than a second-category violinist receives gross in a month. A two-and-a-half-hour rehearsal is worth about 5,800 euros, before paying the conductor, the soloist, the technicians, the hall, the lights, the heating. And the minimums are the floor. In its 2024 accounts the Teatro Regio of Turin declares a personnel cost of 18,745,400 euros for 309.47 full-time-equivalent employees; once the 825,289 euros set aside for the renewal of the national contract are removed, the average cost is 57,905 euros each. It is an average that mixes players, choristers, technicians and clerks, but it gives the order of magnitude of a real theatre. With that average the hour of one player costs about 45 euros, the hour of ninety players around four thousand, the two-and-a-half-hour rehearsal around ten thousand.
There is a detail the sum makes plain. For a permanent orchestra the salary is monthly: the hour is paid even when no one is rehearsing. The contract measures time, the music measures the result, and the difference between the two is decided by whoever is on the podium. Ten minutes lost waiting for a late singer, with ninety players seated and their instruments tuned, cost, at the Regio’s average costs, about seven hundred euros.
In the same 2024 accounts the Regio records a value of production of 37,927,332 euros. The National Fund for Live Performance (Fondo nazionale per lo spettacolo dal vivo) assigned it 13,591,248 euros, plus an additional contribution of 1,412,319.