Teatro San Cassiano
An imaginative and compelling project to reconstruct Venice’s Teatro San Cassiano as it had been in 1637. Famous for the very first public performance of opera when Francesco Manelli’s L’Andromeda (libretto by Benedetto Ferrari) was presented to a paying public, it started an explosion in popularity of this new artform, first in Venice then quickly around Italy and Europe.
Led by Dr Paul Atkin, the project aims to again present Baroque opera to a paying public. A reconstruction of the 1637 opera house will be built as faithfully as regulations will allow, complete with stage machinery, moving sets and special effects.
In its initial stages, the reconstruction is based on backward inferences from:
a carefully measured survey made in, or prior to, 1763 of Teatro San Cassiano by the architect Francesco Bognolo, which captured features from the 1695 layout,
a full understanding of the original site’s constraints and opportunities,
contemporary eye-witness accounts,
aristocratic antecedents,
other opera houses that followed relatively soon after.
The most useful surviving reference is the plan of the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo drawn between 1691-3, but possibly depicting the house as it had been before 1683, and found in a collection at the Soane museum in the early twentieth century.
A very small house by modern standards, the Teatro San Cassiano will provide an intimate and powerful visual and acoustic experience.
During the site evaluation period accommodation within two redundant gasometers was evaluated and eventually rejected. Part of the evaluation is illustrated below.
