Teatro La Fenice

Interesting facts

Verdi's La traviata premiered here on 6 March 1853 and flopped; Verdi called the night a fiasco but was sure the opera would triumph.

Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress had its world premiere here on 11 September 1951, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as Anne Trulove.

Britten himself conducted the world premiere of The Turn of the Screw here on 14 September 1954, a Venice Biennale commission.

The original house went up in about 18 months, from June 1790 to its opening in May 1792.

Selva's design was chosen from around thirty competition entries.

The royal box was not part of Selva's plan; it was first built provisionally in 1807 for Napoleon.

The royal box was removed in 1848 during the short-lived Venetian Republic and rebuilt in 1849 under Austrian rule.

Just two months before the 1996 fire, an acoustician had measured the hall's acoustics in detail, leaving a record of its sound.

One of the two convicted arsonists fled abroad and was arrested in 2007 at the border between Mexico and Belize.

Why it is worth it

Few opera houses carry their history in their name as literally as La Fenice — the Phoenix — in Venice. It was built after its owners lost the city's leading theatre, the San Benedetto, in a legal dispute, and they named the new house after the bird that rises from its own ashes. The name proved prophetic: the theatre burned in 1836 and again, through arson, in 1996, and each time it was rebuilt.

The first house was designed by Giannantonio Selva after a competition and opened in May 1792. Its neoclassical front on Campo San Fantin, with a colonnade, the muses of tragedy and dance in niches and the phoenix above the entrance, is the only part to have survived both fires; it is also the only historic Venetian theatre facing an open square rather than an alley. After the fire of 1836 the brothers Giambattista and Tommaso Meduna rebuilt the auditorium within a year, in the gilded, plush late-Empire taste that lasted until the 1990s.

That auditorium hosted an astonishing run of premieres. Rossini's Tancredi and Semiramide, Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Beatrice di Tenda, and then Verdi's Ernani, Attila, Rigoletto, La traviata and Simon Boccanegra all opened here. In the twentieth century the Biennale brought Stravinsky and Britten, and later Nono and Berio wrote for the house.

On the night of 29 January 1996 two electricians set fire to the theatre to avoid penalties for delays in repair work; only the perimeter walls survived. The rebuilding followed Aldo Rossi's design under the Venetian motto "as it was, where it was". To recover lost details the team studied stills from Visconti's film Senso, shot in the house in 1954; some 200 craftsmen spent 650 days recreating the five tiers of boxes, gilding and ceiling. The theatre reopened in December 2003, and the tradition of the Venice New Year's Concert began to celebrate the rebirth. Critics still argue over whether the new gold is too bright; audiences mostly look up and gasp.

Getting there

La Fenice stands on Campo San Fantin in the centre of Venice. The nearest airport is Venice Marco Polo Airport (VCE), about 8 km away across the lagoon. Venice is car-free: arrive on foot or by water transport.

From the encyclopaedia

Teatro La Fenice is a historic opera house in Venice, Italy. It is one of "the most famous and renowned landmarks in the history of Italian theatre" and in the history of opera as a whole. Especially in the 19th century, La Fenice became the site of many famous operatic premieres at which several works by the four major bel canto era composers—Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi—were performed.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Teatro La Fenice

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia