La Scala puts every performance since 1778 online in new digital chronology
Libretti, historic newspapers and Giampiero Tintori’s 1978 bicentenary listings have helped fill the gap between 1778 and 1943 in La Scala’s online records.
Teatro alla Scala has launched a new digital chronology covering every performance staged at the theatre from its foundation in 1778 to the present day. It is available from today on the theatre’s website (teatroallascala.org) under Media / L’archivio storico.
Closing the gap before 1943
Until now the website listed only performances from the 1943/44 season onwards, illustrated with digital reproductions of posters and photographs. To fill the gap between the theatre’s foundation in 1778 and 1943, a project began two years ago to digitise the historical chronology compiled by Giampiero Tintori, then director of the Museo Teatrale, for La Scala‘s bicentenary in 1978.
The original was very schematic and clean, which made it well suited to becoming a new database of the earliest performances.
Drawing on many sources
Named ‘Archivio Tintori’, the project was enriched along the way with a great deal of information not found in the original chronology. Sources include original libretti, now available in digital form through library systems and in particular Corago, the digital information system developed by the University of Bologna for research on opera between 1600 and 1900.
Further sources include an unpublished chronology by Carlo Marinelli Roscioni covering 1880 to 1920, part of a collection left to the Archive of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. The historic chronologies by Luigi Romani (1862), Pompeo Cambiasi (1906), and Guido Marangoni and Carlo Vanbianchi (1920), already consulted by Tintori, were also used.
Milanese newspapers were another important resource: La gazzetta di Milano for much of the nineteenth century, and then Il Corriere della Sera from 1876. For the period from 1921 onwards, when the Ente Autonomo was created, the team used all the available posters, programmes and other materials.
One search for the whole history
Once ‘Archivio Tintori’ was complete and testing had begun, the theatre concluded that the research had reached a depth that allowed the new database to be merged with the existing one. A single search form now covers the entire history of La Scala.
