★ First example of globalisation in the music industry.
★ Sample English translation available.

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 continent

Antonio Schilirò
after a degree in Classical Literature, studies in composition and a diplo-ma in piano, deepened his musicology studies at the University of Freiburg under the guidance of H.H. Eggebrecht. He teaches History of Music at the Conservatorio 'N. Paganini' in Genoa (1977-80) and 'G. Verdi' in Milan (1980-2016), where he has been the coordinator of the musicology course since 2010. In 2012 he published an essay on Giulia Recli for the volume Le Lombarde in musica, followed by the monograph Il melodramma, le sue forme la vita musicale italiana nell'Ottocento (2016). He has edited several entries for the Dizionario Enciclopedico Universale della Musica e dei Musicisti (DEUMM), has written theatre programmes for various institutions and was the coordinator responsible for those of the Società del Quartetto di Milano. In 2016 he conceived and promoted the research project 'Nei palchi della Scala (1778-1920)', in collaboration with the Conservatorio, the Teatro alla Scala and the Ufficio Ricerche Fonti Musicali (URFM) of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense.