James Gillray, “The Pic-Nic Orchestra”, 1802. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (public domain).
In 1816 a Roman theatre commissioned a new opera from a twenty-three-year-old and staged it two months later. In 2026 an Italian theatre programmes a season made almost entirely of titles written between 1780 and 1920, and the word it uses to justify the choice is repertoire. The opera house has stopped being contemporary theatre and has become a museum of works from the past. Melos starts from here and takes a position: in programmes funded with public money, the historical repertoire should be cut in half.
Half and half. It is not a provocation, it is the minimum compatible with the survival of the trade of writing for the theatre. There are three objections and all of them are predictable.
First objection: the public wants those titles. True, and not an argument. The public wants those titles because they are the only ones it has been offered for fifty years, and demand formed around supply, not the other way round. The public of 1830 wanted new operas for exactly the same reason. Nobody is born with a preference for Traviata: you acquire it by living in a country where Traviata is what is on offer.
Second objection: new music is ugly and empties the halls. Here the answer is uncomfortable, because to a large extent the objection is well founded, and the reason is precise. For half a century new music for the theatre has been written almost only by authors trained inside the academies and judged by other authors trained inside the academies, with the audience reduced to a negligible variable and often regarded as a nuisance. When a trade stops measuring itself against those who receive it, it deforms. That is what happened for a whole generation, and the theatres have paid the bill for choices they did not make.
The cure is not to stop producing, it is to remember where this form comes from. Opera was born as popular entertainment of the very highest level, and Mozart, Rossini and Verdi wrote to be understood and to fill a hall that same evening. Whoever claims that art is not entertainment should try explaining it to a person who pays for a ticket, takes the car, looks for parking and walks into the theatre at 8 pm. Entertainment of the very highest level is still entertainment. The opposite is not depth, it is punishment.
Third objection: it costs too much. A new staging of a historical title costs as much as a new staging of a new opera, and often more, because the historical title demands sets and a star cast. The real difference is not in the budget, it is in the risk. And it is exactly the risk that public money should cover: if the state funds only what is sure to work, it is not investing, it is buying tickets.
And here the thing under all three must be said. The Italian state puts derisory sums into opera and in exchange demands control of appointments, from the superintendents down. It is the worst of both worlds: little money and a lot of politics. A country that invented this art form and sells it to the world as its own flag should decide whether to fund it seriously or stop governing it. As long as things stay as they are, inside the theatres a war among the poor is fought, and that war consumes more energy than the music does.
The damage nobody puts on the balance sheet concerns the trades. In a country that does not produce new operas the trade of writing them does not exist. Whoever graduates in composition today faces no pipeline at all: nobody to commission, no publisher to publish, no theatre obliged to stage. Conservatories train people every year for a job that the system has stopped offering, and then we are surprised when they end up teaching in a middle school. It is not a problem of talent, it is a problem of commissioning.
Then there is the question of faces, which is the least discussed and perhaps the most decisive. In the nineteenth century people did not go to hear Mozart, they went to hear whoever sang Mozart. The stars were the performers, alive and recognisable in the street. Then the singers became unknown and we put the composers at the centre, who in the meantime had died. With Callas and Pavarotti dead too, what remains is the repertoire with nobody to become attached to. A form of spectacle that does not produce faces does not produce an audience.
A concrete example, to show this is not theory. In Rome there is a Museo delle Cere and there is no permanent Tosca. Tosca is the opera that tells the story of Rome, with Sant’Andrea della Valle and Castel Sant’Angelo inside the libretto, and in that city it is not on the bill every day. In Tokyo you go to see nô, in Seville flamenco, in New York the musical, every evening of the year. In Rome, nothing. A fixed, permanent production, with rotating casts, would by itself pay for part of the season and free up resources for new operas. Half and half, in practice, pays for itself.
Reducing the repertoire is not a slight to the masterpieces. Masterpieces need no protection: they have a two-hundred-year head start, an endless discography and half the halls in the world. What needs protection is what does not yet exist, and the way to protect it is not a prize or an open call, it is an obligation to programme, with external listening committees that are not appointed by whoever puts up the money. The yardstick, for the institution as for the author, remains one only: whoever takes public money answers for it and makes it bear fruit, and a wrong investment is stopped. It holds for whoever programmes only what is already safe and it holds for whoever writes an opera that nobody hears.
Melos will return to this with numbers, institution by institution: how many new operas have been commissioned in Italy in the last five years, by whom, with how many performances, and what they cost compared with revivals. Until then this remains a position, and should be read for what it is.