NAPLES — Fulvio Adamo Macciardi became superintendent and artistic director of the Teatro di San Carlo, Italy’s oldest opera house, at the end of 2025. His first full season, marking the 290th anniversary, opens December 2 and looks toward its eighteenth century roots and 300th birthday in 2037. He presents the programm at the Foreign Press Association at Rome.
Q. What does it mean to lead the San Carlo?
“It is a great honor, because leading the oldest musical institution in Italy means engaging with an extraordinary history,” Macciardi said. He pointed to a line from Stendhal, printed in this season’s program. “There is nothing in all of Europe that comes close to this theater, or even gives the faintest idea of it,” Stendhal wrote. “This hall, built in three hundred days, is a coup d’état. It secures the king’s popularity better than the most perfect law ever could.”
Q. Why frame this season around the 290th anniversary rather than waiting for the 300th?
“I thought it was important to begin ten years earlier, building a path dedicated to the roots and history of this theater,” Macciardi said. The San Carlo was founded by the Bourbon king to celebrate Neapolitan music. “Even Mozart, on his first trip to Italy, came to Naples, but no one asked him to write a piece for the San Carlo,” he said. “For a composer, that was one of the highest honors.”
Q. What opens the season on December 2?
Verdi’s Luisa Miller, originally commissioned by the theater, opens the season, launching a two year project completed in 2027 with a Donizetti title, honoring a former director, and a Rossini title.
Q. The season also digs into the eighteenth century. Why?
The San Carlo was built in 1737, and that era produced roughly a century of composers who wrote for the house. In April it alternates Paisiello’s comic opera Nina, ossia la “Pazza per amore” with Donizetti’s rarely staged Otto mesi in due ore, turning two hundred in 2027.
Q. What can audiences expect from the new Aida?
Led by an Italian conductor and director, part of a season where most directors are Italian, Macciardi said. The production tours Japan for two weeks in July in a compact staging built for transport. “Aida is often associated with grandeur, but especially in the third act, it is a very intimate opera, a love story beyond the triumphal march,” he said.
Q. This season includes a new commission. What is it?
Composer Alessandro Solbiati will complete and reorchestrate an unfinished Debussy opera, The Fall of the House of Usher, based on the Poe story, staged with the Ravenna Festival. “Solbiati will bring his reworking close to Debussy’s style, while adding something of his own language,” Macciardi said.
Q. What else rounds out the anniversary season?
The season also revives Ferzan Özpetek’s Madama Butterfly and Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, and adds Britten’s Peter Grimes and a lavish 1990s production still drawing spontaneous applause, Macciardi said.
Interview, Music, Culture, Naples, Campania, History, Voices
