In the pitch-dark auditorium of Rome’s Teatro Costanzi, a high-pitched wail floated from the galleries above. Dozens of lanterns lit up, their rays crisscrossing madly, searching for the source of the sound.
The rays of light focused on a spectral figure: a thin, dark-haired woman dressed in white, moving to a funereal rhythm and singing plaintively. In the audience, about 130 children, between 8 and 10 years old, let out screams, some gasps and a “it’s not real.” Several shouted “Emma, Emma.”
The children had just been informed that there was a resident ghost at the Costanzi, the capital’s opera house. No, not that. This was said to be the spirit of Emma Carelli, an Italian soprano who ran the theater a century ago and loved it so much that she was reluctant to abandon it, even in death.
“The theater is a place where strange things happen, where the impossible becomes possible,” Francesco Giambrone, general director of the Costanzi, told the children on Saturday afternoon as they arrived for a sleepover to get to know the theater. .
Music education is a low priority in Italy, the country that invented opera and gave the world some of its greatest composers. Many experts, including Giambrone, say his country has rested on its considerable laurels rather than cultivating a musical culture that encourages students to learn about his illustrious heritage.
With little support from schools or lawmakers, arts organizations like Costanzi have concluded that it is up to them to reach young people.
Giambrone sought to dispel the stuffy image of opera by abandoning the genre’s strict dress code. That change, like the sleepover, is part of his effort to make opera, often seen as an elitist, intellectual and abstruse art form for the initiated, more familiar and accessible, especially to children.
“We believe that theater should be for everyone and that it should make people feel at home,” Giambrone said in an interview. Hence the decision to welcome young people there so that they can eat, sleep and play. “Once a theater is a home, it’s no longer something distant, something a little austere to fear, or a place where you feel inadequate,” he said.
“There is a lot of talk about Made in Italy, but there is a real myopia when it comes to our musical heritage, envied throughout the world,” said Maestro Antonio Caroccia, professor of music history at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. He said that “politicians turn a deaf ear.”
“Italy is far behind” many other countries, said Barbara Minghetti of Opera Education, which creates programs for children. “I can guarantee this.”
While in the Italian Parliament, Michele Nitti, a musician and former 5-Star Movement legislator, proposed a law adding music education to school curricula. His bill never came to a parliamentary vote.
He said that not even Giuseppe Verdi, the 19th-century composer who also served in Parliament, was able, in his time, to get his fellow lawmakers to support music education in schools.
Nitti also failed to get lawmakers to declare opera singing a national treasure. He supported the country’s successful attempt to include the practice of opera singing in Italy on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
“Oh, well,” he said.
Instead of letting its operatic culture weaken, Giambrone said: “Italy should teach other countries how it’s done.”
At the Teatro Costanzi, more than half of the children who stayed overnight belonged to scout troops from the outskirts of Rome. They were accompanied by calm scout leaders who, impressively, imposed silence with the lift of a finger.
Most of the children had never visited the theater before. “Now that I think about it, I haven’t been there either,” said Gianpaolo Ricciarelli, one of the parents who left his son behind.
Another parent, Armando Cereoli, said: “Between video games, mobile phones and Netflix, there is tough competition to get children interested in beautiful things.”
Some of the children came from disadvantaged neighborhoods, so the visit was “an opportunity to free their minds and dream,” said Sara Greci, a scout leader and Red Cross worker who brought four girls from a home for abused women. their children.
The opera runs several outreach programs for the homeless or people living in Rome’s most remote neighborhoods, a way to open the theater to the city and expand its reach, said Andrea Bonadio, who was hired by the theater to work on these programs. programs.
Nunzia Nigro, the theater’s marketing and education director, said several of the children who had participated in the theater’s educational programs over the past 25 years were loyal patrons today. “We’re starting to reap some of those efforts and have a younger audience,” she said.
Nigro helped organize the sleepover, tailoring it for children ages 8 to 10, old enough for sleepovers but not old enough for hormones to kick in, she said. As it was, two children felt so homesick that their mothers took them in.
On Saturday, the children watched part of a rehearsal for an upcoming performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony: “the conductor uses a wand to direct the music, not that different from Harry Potter but more important,” Nigro said. They learned how the staff cleaned the world’s largest chandelier in a historic building, and learned the ins and outs of the theater through a scavenger hunt (read: general mayhem) that had them up and down stairs, in and out of stagnant buildings like a French farce of several characters.
The ghost Emma, Valentina Gargano, a soprano from the opera’s young artists program, gave an encore, demanding the children promise to tell their friends about “this magical place” and return when they grow up.
One girl was so convinced that Mrs. Gargano was a real ghost that the organizers made sure to see her when the soprano was in street clothes.
After being serenaded with music, including Brahms’ classic lullaby, the children settled in (or attempted to) in a patchwork of sleeping bags on an artificial green turf used in a previous production of Madama Butterfly. Above them stood large photographs of some of the stars who performed at the Costanzi, such as Maria Callas, Herbert von Karajan and Rudolf Nureyev.
After breakfast on Sunday, the children participated in workshops in which they designed colorful paper ballet costumes, learned basic ballet positions, sang as part of a chorus (some with more enthusiasm than others), and performed a version of snakes and ladders opera themed. The game was designed and supervised by Giordano Punturo, the opera’s stage director, dressed in a tuxedo and colorful top hat.
He didn’t know anything about the kids, he said, “but I had the time of my life.”
After singing as a group and taking a photo, it was almost time to head home.
“You had fun?” —Mr. Giambrone asked the children. “Yeah!!” They applauded. “Did you sleep well?” he asked, to a more mixed response. Several “Nos” were notably heard. Come back soon, he said.
After hugging his parents who had come to pick him up, Andrea Quadrini, almost 11, couldn’t wait to tell them that his team had won in snakes and ladders, and that the treasure hunt had been especially fun.
“Wow,” he said. “I saw an opera house for the first time.”