Teatro San Cassiano and Sustainable Musicology

We are delighted to share that the Teatro San Cassiano project has been presented and highlighted in Marco Bizzarini’s recent open-access book Musicologia sostenibile (Sustainable Musicology), published by FedOA Press – Federico II University Press.

The book is freely available in open access here:

http://www.fedoabooks.unina.it/index.php/fedoapress/catalog/book/771

In this book, Bizzarini presents the reconstruction of the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice as a significant example of what he calls sustainable musicology: a form of musicological work that does not remain confined to academic debate, but becomes active in public cultural life through performance, education, theatre architecture, craftsmanship and civic engagement.

This recognition is especially meaningful to us, because it touches the very heart of our mission.

The Teatro San Cassiano project has never been conceived as a nostalgic return to the past. Our aim is to reconnect Venice with the origins of public opera by bringing together rigorous historical research and living artistic practice. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera repertoire was created for specific spaces, acoustics, theatrical conventions and social contexts. To recover those conditions today is not to reproduce the past mechanically, but to make historical knowledge meaningful again for performers, audiences, scholars and the city itself.

At a time when Venice has recently elected a new Mayor, this recognition also invites a wider reflection on the cultural future of the city. The Teatro San Cassiano offers Venice not another short-lived cultural event, but a durable international laboratory for historically informed opera, scholarship, education, craftsmanship and civic renewal.

We are therefore grateful that Bizzarini’s book places the Teatro San Cassiano within a broader discussion on the future of musicology and the humanities: one in which research becomes more accessible, more durable and more culturally transformative.

As always, many thanks for your kind attention and invaluable support for our project.

Together we can make it happen.