The Teatro di San Carlo, Naples. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The oldest opera house in the world still in operation turns 290, wears its years very well, and celebrates with an avowedly celebratory season. It starts on 2 December 2026 with Luisa Miller: Daniel Oren on the podium, direction by Davide Livermore, and a cast fit for a true opening night, Mariangela Sicilia, Piotr Beczala, Igor Golovatenko, Michele Pertusi. Verdi, tragic and domestic, to open the birthday year: the theatre was founded on 4 November 1737.
The schedule, eleven titles, plays two tables at once with Neapolitan intelligence. On one side, the house heritage: Paisiello’s Nina o sia La pazza per amore entrusted to Fabio Biondi, and the Donizetti rarity Otto mesi in due ore, that is, the Naples that was the musical capital of Europe making itself heard again. On the other, the incursions: a Butterfly directed by Ferzan Özpetek, Britten’s Peter Grimes, La damnation de Faust with Michieletto, and the most learned wager of the year, Debussy’s La chute de la maison Usher in Alessandro Solbiati’s completion: an unfinished opera entrusted to a living composer, which is exactly the kind of gesture this magazine has always asked of theatres.
Around it, the party: Plácido Domingo’s gala for the fifty-fifth anniversary of his Neapolitan debut, with Sonya Yoncheva; fourteen symphonic concerts built around the Beethoven bicentenary of 2027; a piano festival lining up Gadjiev, Lortie, Lonquich, Bavouzet and the debut, at ninety-one, of Bruno Canino, who had never played at the San Carlo as a soloist, and that news alone is worth the season. In summer, a double finale: Tosca at the Arena Flegrea directed by Edoardo De Angelis, and the tour of Japan with Aida. A theatre that at 290 exports, commissions completions and gives a ninety-one-year-old his debut is not a museum: it is a house that is still lived in. Happy birthday. Sources: official presentation of the 2026/27 season, Teatro di San Carlo, June 2026.