Nineteenth-century musical Italy is, according to Bruno Barilli's famous definition, 'the country of melodrama', and the theatre is its space par excellence, and La Scala favoured the establishment of Milan as the capital of the opera industry. This requires an articulate and complex organisation that, in addition to the artists, includes agents, impresarios and technical personnel in the sector and enables the 'turnkey' transfer of Italian opera performances to the other side of the planet. And in Milan, the Teatro alla Scala was built with the intention of being the centre of this production system. The theatre, inaugurated in 1778, was built thanks to the obstinate, tenacious and passionate determination of the most illustrious families of the Lombard aristocracy, after a fire had destroyed the Regio Ducal Teatro on the night of 25 February 1776. It was the nobles who entirely financed the construction of the new Teatro Grande at La Scala, receiving in exchange a box with an adjoining dressing room.
In writing this book, the author has been able to draw on numerous precious archive sources, both public and private, some of which have only recently been made accessible and are presented and discussed here for the first time, and thus explain why a city, Milan, built a theatre, La Scala, that was already considered the most famous in Europe and the world fifty years after its inauguration. Nineteenth-century Italian melodrama in the Lombard city became a repertoire and from Milan went on to conquer the five continents. The role of a publisher such as Ricordi, which owes its fortune to the opera repertoire, is also affirmed, since the repertoire is largely made up of titles from its catalogue that are performed in hundreds of theatres on different continents.