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The Teatro Donizetti is Bergamo's opera house and its musical self-portrait: built by a merchant, rebuilt after a fire, and renamed for Gaetano Donizetti, the composer born and raised in the city. A major restoration of the theatre began in 2017.
Why it matters
Bergamo calls itself the home of Gaetano Donizetti, and this theatre is where that claim lives. Founded in the eighteenth century as the Teatro Riccardi, built by a merchant who gave the city its first stable theatre, it was designed by the architect Giovanni Francesco Lucchini and inaugurated on 24 August 1791. Destroyed by fire in 1797, it reopened on 30 June 1800 in Lucchini's reconstruction, and in 1897, on the centenary of the composer's birth, it took the name it still carries. Maria Callas sang here in 1954; in 1964 the house reopened with Lucia di Lammermoor conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni, a Bergamasque maestro central to the Donizetti revival.
What to notice
The Fondazione's documentation of the restoration includes designs, renderings of the facades, a decorative restoration programme and an acoustic project. The Fondazione also manages the Teatro Sociale, the Donizetti Studio and the composer's birthplace, Casa Natale di Gaetano Donizetti.
Context and history
The theatre began in the 1780s as the Riccardi, named for the merchant who built Bergamo's first stable playhouse on this site in the lower city; Lucchini's design and the 1791 inauguration made it an architectural event, and the 1797 fire and 1800 reopening made it a phoenix. The theatre's golden thread runs through its namesake: Donizetti performed at the Riccardi in 1840, near the end of his life, and the 1897 renaming confirmed the house as the shrine of the city's greatest composer. Municipal ownership arrived in 1938, and the post-war decades brought the Callas appearance of 1954 and the 1964 reopening under Gavazzeni that relaunched the house as a Donizetti stage of international standing. The restoration project, known as the Teatro Donizetti cantiere, began in 2017.