Portrait of Pietro Mascagni. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
More than ten million people watch the final of the Sanremo song festival. The world premiere of a new Italian opera, when there is one, is seen over three evenings by a few thousand spectators, some of whom came on subscription and others out of professional duty. Between these two numbers there is no difference of quality. There is a difference of mechanism.
The idea is therefore banal in the best sense of the word: an annual television festival of new operas, with twelve titles in competition, the performers who created them, the public broadcaster producing and airing it, and a vote at the end. Before we throw up our hands, look at where this form comes from, because it is no recent American gimmick.
In 1888 the Milanese publisher Edoardo Sonzogno announced a competition for a one-act opera by an Italian composer, not yet staged. More than seventy scores arrived. The jury rewarded three, and one was called Cavalleria rusticana. It opened at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 17 May 1890, and within two years went around the world. Its composer was twenty-six, his name was Pietro Mascagni, and when he mailed the package he was living in Cerignola, directing the local band and philharmonic society.
The same competition, in its first edition in 1883, had rejected Le Villi by a twenty-four-year-old from Lucca named Giacomo Puccini. This is the honest part of the story and it should be told along with the other: juries get it wrong, and they get it wrong regularly. But even the rejected opera found a way, precisely because the competition had put names in circulation, along with publishers willing to listen to them. A mechanism that selects badly is still enormously more useful than one that does not select at all, because at least it produces material, debate and curiosity.
The predictable objection is that opera is not a contest. Historically that is false. Eighteenth-century theatres lived on declared rivalries between companies, between singers and between cities; people bet on the stage as today they bet on the pitch, and silence fell in the house only when a real challenge was under way. The reverent setting, the darkness, the ban on applauding between movements are recent inventions, and they arrived together with the loss of the audience, not before it.
The second objection is more serious: television flattens, and five minutes of an aria pulled from an opera says nothing about the opera. True, if the format is a shop window. Less true if the format shows the workshop: who wrote the text and why, how a passage sounds before and after the conductor has put his hands on it, what the soprano has to say who is creating that role right now. The television audience is not stupid, it is out of the habit. What it cannot stand is not complexity, it is ceremonial boredom.
Then comes the point that decides whether the thing works or remains a pleasant evening, and it concerns the prize. Whoever wins must really win. A festival that closes with a plaque and applause is entertainment, and the next year nobody sends in anything. The prize must be a real production, in a real theatre, with a real cast and a minimum number of performances.
The way to get there, though, is not to force a theatre to host the winner, because no theatre management will ever agree to have its opening night decided by a televote, and that clause would fall at the first line. The way is to turn it around: after the announcement, a competition opens among the theatres, each presenting its own production offer with performances, place in the season, budget and company; a public fund tops up the chosen offer, and the author decides. That way nobody is forced into anything and everyone has an interest in coming forward, because the theatre that wins the title takes home a co-financed production, an opera the country has just spent a week talking about, and an audience that for once already knows what it is about. The works placed second through fifth go into a list from which the others may draw under the same rules.
The cost of all this is the strongest argument, and nobody ever uses it. A new opera production of medium size costs about as much as a couple of prime-time television evenings. Twelve new operas a year, with partial public funding, fit within a sum that in the Italian state budget is invisible to the naked eye. We are talking about a few million, to restart the only art form this country has exported for four centuries.
What remains is the question that matters, and it is not whether the public would watch. It is whether there are twelve new operas a year worth watching. Today there are not, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. But they do not exist because for fifty years nobody has asked for them, and trades that nobody asks for die out. In 1888 a notice in a newspaper was enough to bring seventy scores from all over Italy, written by people who did something else by day. They were there, waiting only for someone to ask.