Teatro La Fenice

The Teatro La Fenice in Venice, opened on 16 May 1792 with Giovanni Paisiello's I giuochi di Agrigento, ranks among the world's most important opera houses and is Italy's most significant after La Scala in Milan. Its name — "The Phoenix" — derives from the prophetic promise of rising in renewed splendour from the ashes of previous theatre fires. The building did indeed burn down twice: in 1836 due to a heating system defect, and in 1996 to arson committed by two electricians seeking to avoid contractual penalties for late work. After eight years of reconstruction faithful to the original ("dov'era, com'era" — where it was, as it was), La Fenice reopened in 2003. The house has hosted some of opera history's most important premieres: Vincenzo Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830), Gaetano Donizetti's Belisario (1836), Giuseppe Verdi's Ernani (1844), Attila (1846), Rigoletto (1851), La Traviata (1853), and Simon Boccanegra (1857). In the twentieth century followed Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951), Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw (1954), and Luigi Nono's Intolleranza 1960 (1961) — La Fenice was as crucial to modernism as it had been to Romanticism. The gilded auditorium in bonbonnière style, with five tiers of boxes, abundant stucco, and ceiling frescoes, seats approximately 1,000 and is considered one of the acoustically and visually most beautiful opera theatres in Europe. Today Daniele Callegari serves as musical director of the Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice, which also produces the annual New Year's Concert from Venice — broadcast worldwide as the cultural counterpart to Vienna's Neujahrskonzert.