Reviving Teatro San Cassiano: The Birthplace of Opera
Scholars and architects unveil the project to restore Venice's Teatro San Cassiano, the world's first public opera house, opened in 1637. Free.
Why we picked this
The original public opera house — the one that made opera a democratic art form rather than a court spectacle — is being rebuilt. This is the story of how that happened, told by the people doing it.
In 1637, Venice opened the Teatro San Cassiano and changed the history of music: for the first time, opera left private courts and became available to anyone who could buy a ticket. Nearly four centuries later, a team of scholars, architects, and performers is working to restore and reconstruct the theater, and this free evening at the Italian Cultural Institute presents that vision in full.
Dr. Paul Atkin, CEO of Teatro San Cassiano Group Ltd., and Professor Ellen Rosand of Yale University — one of the world’s leading scholars of Baroque opera — anchor the presentation alongside Artistic Director Bill Barclay of Concert Theatre Works. Together they walk through the historical research, the architectural methodology, and what it means to bring a seventeenth-century cultural institution back to life in a city that has changed dramatically around it.
The evening doesn’t stay purely academic: Juilliard soprano Elisse Albian and theorist Alex Vourtsanis perform live early opera works, grounding the restoration story in the sound of the repertoire that first filled those walls. A rare convergence of scholarship, preservation, and live performance.