Teatro Di San Carlo

Where music can stop time

A tall, striking woman personally welcomes subscriber viewers to the premieres of Teatro Di San Carlo, knowing their names and their stories. She is Emmanuela Spedaliere, the theatre’s General Director, who has forged a strong bond, a personal relationship with the audiences of Naples.

As I reach the theatre I am thinking back to this story I read: at some point, when there was political interference in the theatre’s affairs, she resigned and accepted a very good posting at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The next day, Il Mattino newspaper came out with the heading ‘We want Spedaliari back’. She read it, and came back on her own terms. I muse on all this as I cross the Galleria Umberto, this high and spacious cross-shaped structure surmounted by a glass dome. Suddenly, framed in the apse of the Galleria’s exit, the view of Teatro di San Carlo, at once lightweight and imposing, takes my breath away with its beauty. Built in 1737 by order of King Charles III of Bourbon, this is one of Europe’s oldest theatres, preceding La Scala in Milan by 41 years and La Fenice in Venice by 55.

The façade is dominated by a sculptural complex, the Triad of Parthenope, the siren who, according to the ancient myth, crowned musicians and poets.

Emmanuela Spedaliere awaits me at the theatre’s luminous café together with Nicolina from the press office. Emmanuela has been working here for 27 years, first as marketing director and in the last five years as General Director. “My life is the theatre. Ι have great respect for this place”, she says and goes on to analyse the long connection of San Carlo with contemporary art; one way of dealing with the ephemeral aspect inherent in opera and the theatre is by commissioning major visual artists to do the costumes and stage sets, such as Erté, Picasso, Rauschenberg, Hockney, Kentridge, Paladino, Kiefer and Paolini, among many others.

“San Carlo was always interested in combining contemporary art and not having just a museum view of the opera”, she says as she proudly shows me the catalogue published on the occasion of celebrations for the 150^th anniversary of Italy’s unification. “We want to be open to innovation and combine it with tradition. For example, this year we collaborate with Kengo Kuma. Shiwa Shiwa is the title of the exclusive scenography created for Alcantara by the famous Japanese architect, which forms the backdrop to Verdi’s opera, Simon Boccanegra”.

A that point we are joined by the Teatro’s Casting Director, Ilias Tzempetonidis, and the conversation now becomes trilingual—in Italian, English and Greek. “For us it’s important to have two or three artists each season”, says the Greek director; “this year, we are in partnership with Vanessa Beecroft for Partenope–an opera composed by Ennio Morricone on a libretto by Guido Barbieri and Sandro Cappelletto about the Siren of Naples. Vanessa Beecroft will create a very special installation for the occasion. This will be in December”.

Finance is always the tricky part for such theatres. I ask how they manage.

“It is important to have many, many donors”, says Emanuela. “It is not easy. Because now culture is in crisis. It’s very difficult to raise money. Very difficult because look a little bit outside how the world is and look inside how this world is. It’s two different planets”.

“All we try to do here”, adds Ilias Tzempetonidis, “is simply to revive the genius of composers. This music was written by ingenious composers—nobody knows how. So we try to revive, to reconstruct this music for the Neapolitan audience in 2025. If we do this with a lot of passion, a lot of love and as faithfully as possible to what the composer says, we have a good chance of awakening, of touching even as few as two or three individuals in an audience of 1,200, who will forget reality for a moment. That is, we will stop time. That’s what music does: it stops time. It is a shower of pure energy”.

And yet the outside world and that of the theatre can meet, after all. This was demonstrated by a project undertaken by San Carlo in San Giovanni a Teduccio, a suburb of Naples. Over there was an old tomato processing factory. Now the place is called Officine San Carlo, and there young students learn to make anything from stage sets and costumes to furniture, and even produce their own plays. A programme for youths from declined areas with few schooling opportunities; a way out into something different. “This is something we started during the pandemic, and in the end it is going very well”, says Emmanuela. “Now everyone supports it—the mayor, the regional government, the people—because they saw it was something special. Art can change your life”.

Can love do the same thing? “No, no, mai [never]”, she replies and we burst out laughing. “Art and culture will never betray you. They can only enrich your life. But everything else… When I have problems with family or with friends, Ι forget everything once I go to the theatre. It’s worth it. My love is Teatro San Carlo”. I ask if that was what made her return from Florence, within a day from the newspaper’s public appeal.

“I decided to return here because I think that there are places of the soul, the places of our being and this for me is the place of my life. I would do it a hundred times more”.

Such passion for work—what room does it leave for personal life, if any?

“On the 31^st of December, most people prepare for New Year’s Eve”, says Ilias Tzempetonidis. “For us, it can be a gala of opera, a gala of ballet. So it’s difficult to have a personal life. You can only do this job at the top level if this is your real passion. Because your family and your friends have to accept that you give a huge priority to this. It’s not a sacrifice, because we love passionately what we do. If you don’t love it, you can’t do it”.

Nicolina from the Press Office is waiting to show me around the Teatro. Dressing rooms, offices, the costume department, the unreal space above the stage, the grand hall with the red velvet, the gold coats-of-arms and the impressive ceiling painted by Antonio, Giuseppe and Giovanni Cammarano, where Apollo presents the greatest poets in the world to Minerva.

I am looking at the imposing stage and thinking that in October 1815 a 23-year-old Gioacchino Rossini signed to have his first opera, Elisabetta Regina d’Inghilterra, performed here.

Gaetano Donizetti composed 17 operas, Niccolò Paganini gave two concerts in 1819, and Vincenzo Bellini fell in love with this prestigious stage where he had his debut in 1826 with Bianca e Gernando, a first opera written specifically for the San Carlo.

“It is true that it’s sometimes difficult to strike a balance between the work here and a personal life”, says Nicolina when I seek a younger person’s view of what we were discussing earlier. “But the magic that you see on stage is just breathtaking, so breathtaking that it makes all the sacrifices worth making”.

I return to the bright café to have an espresso and review my notes. This is a quiet time for this place. Two men walk in, absorbed in their conversation. Suddenly, the older man looks at the piano in the middle of the café, pulls up a stool and sets it in front of the instrument and, without removing his jacket or even the rucksack from his back, opens the lid and starts playing a melody I’ve never heard before. I close my eyes, let the music travel me and think how right Emmanuela was. There is magic in this place.

Carolle Marshall