Teatro Carlo Coccia

Novara’s Teatro Carlo Coccia opened in December 1888 with Arturo Toscanini conducting. Its horseshoe auditorium forms part of the city’s musical heritage, associated with a revised version of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut in 1893 and with the Premio Cantelli conducting competition.

Why it matters

The Teatro Coccia is Novara's principal opera house. Its inaugural night on 22 December 1888 presented Meyerbeer's "Gli ugonotti" conducted by Arturo Toscanini, then at the start of the career that made him the most celebrated conductor of the century; he returned to the house for Verdi's Aida and La forza del destino. A revised first-act finale of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut was performed here on 21 December 1893; the composer continued to revise the opera in later years. A 1932 Corriere della Sera article called the Coccia the antechamber to La Scala, because so many singers debuted on the Novara stage before graduating to Milan. The theatre also nurtured its own local genius: the Novarese conductor Guido Cantelli, Toscanini's chosen heir, debuted here in Verdi's La traviata in 1943. The theatre has hosted opera, dance, prose and concerts, and is the home of the Premio Cantelli competition.

What to notice

The building announces itself on Via Fratelli Rosselli with a pink granite portico of Baveno stone, its Doric columns wrapping the perimeter, and an upper storey of tall windows divided by Ionic pilasters — a facade meant to dignify a bourgeois city of the late nineteenth century. Inside, the horseshoe auditorium is ringed by three orders of broad boxes, a first gallery and the top-row loggione, all decorated in Renaissance style with cast-iron Corinthian columns capped by sculpted swans, the theatre's recurring emblem. The 1993 restoration recovered the room's original palette — antique-pink velvet, ivory and gold decoration — reversing the all-red scheme and heavy gilding applied in the interwar decades. The stage engineering includes a fourteen-metre proscenium, a twenty-three-metre deep stage and a fly tower rising 22.5 metres, dimensions that explain the house's ability to mount full opera productions. A smaller hall, the Piccolo Coccia, seats around two hundred.

Context and history

The theatre stands on the site of an older tradition. The previous Teatro Nuovo, inaugurated in 1779 to a design by Cosimo Morelli, had become inadequate for a growing city, and after the death in 1873 of Carlo Coccia — for over thirty years maestro di cappella of the cathedral chapter and director of the city's Brera music institute — the old theatre took his name in July of that year. The Teatro Nuovo was demolished in 1886 and the commission for the new building went to the Milanese architect Giuseppe Oliverio, whose project beat out a costlier scheme by Andrea Scala. The new house reused much material from its predecessor, occupied four times the earlier footprint, and turned its entrance towards the present Via Fratelli Rosselli. Over the twentieth century the Coccia's seasons hosted Mascagni, Marinuzzi, Schipa, Pertile, Tebaldi, Del Monaco, Di Stefano and Gobbi, among many others. Since 1998 the Fondazione Teatro Carlo Coccia has managed the theatre.