The reconstruction of the Teatro San Cassiano is of enormous importance for Venice and for the entire world of music.

Please sign and spread the word so as to reach as many people as possible as swiftly as possible.

 

PLEASE SIGN HERE

 

"Appeal: A unique opportunity Venice risks losing

For five years now, the project to rebuild the world’s first public opera house has been officially presented: the Teatro San Cassiano, which opened in Venice in 1637. This project does not aim to exploit the city's resources, it does not ask for a penny from the city, it only needs a site on which to build the theatre.

The reconstruction of the San Cassiano theatre is of enormous importance for Venice and the entire music world.

For Venice because:

• it is an activity that will generate highly specialised employment across various sectors that will integrate easily with the professional skills already present in the city, the Conservatory of Music, IUAV, the Academy of Fine Arts, Ca' Foscari University, to deliver a beneficial impact on the area where it will be built and throughout the whole city;
• it is an activity, which does not attract mass tourism, but the type of global visitors, interested in art and culture, which Venice needs desperately in order to try to reverse the trend towards the never-ending commercialisation of the city;
• is an activity that, with the reconstruction of historical stage machinery, will reconnect the Venetian artisan and engineering tradition of the Arsenale, where these techniques originated, to provide an opportunity to re-appropriate these ancient artisan skills;
• it is an activity that will help to rediscover the importance of 17^th- and 18^th-century Venetian music and will enable the staging and rediscovery of masterpieces preserved in the manuscripts of the Marciana library, of which many remain unpublished; it will also provide Venice with the opportunity to perform music worthy of its musical history, alongside and complementing the other important Venetian institutions devoted to music, first and foremost the Teatro La Fenice.

For the entire music world because:

• it will allow baroque opera to be staged in an acoustically ideal venue, in terms of shape and size, such as which simply does not exist anywhere else in the world;
• it will host the best specialist ensembles of the baroque repertoire from all over the world;
• it will lead to new research, experimentation and discovery in the historical reconstruction of music and stage practices.

Decisions often tend to be procrastinated in our city, for several reasons.

There is no more time. If the project for the reconstruction of the Teatro San Cassiano cannot get formal approval in the next few months, it will be lost, or be realised elsewhere, and Venice will culpably miss, in front of the whole world, an opportunity that will certainly never come again.

This is an appeal to local decision-makers, and to the entire city, so that this project can finally be realised; a project that is one of the few that does not seek to exploit the city and that is already ready to be implemented.

Marco Rosa Salva, Massimo Lonardi, Ilaria Sainato, Nicola Lamon, Pietro Prosser, Antonella Gianese, Serena Mancuso – teachers at the Scuola di Musica Antica di Venezia"

 

We would like to warmly thank those who have already signed the petition and those who would like to sign and spread the word.

A special thanks goes to the Scuola di Musica Antica, Marco Rosa Salva, Massimo Lonardi, Ilaria Sainato, Nicola Lamon, Pietro Prosser, Antonella Gianese, Serena Mancuso and Ida Ossi. 

Together we can make this happen.

Paul Atkin and Teatro San Cassiano