Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi

The Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi is an opera house located in Trieste, Italy and named after the composer Giuseppe Verdi. Privately constructed, it was inaugurated as the Teatro Nuovo to replace the smaller 800-seat "Cesareo Regio Teatro di San Pietro" on 21 April 1801 with a performance of Johann Simon Mayr's Ginevra di Scozia. Initially, the Nuovo had 1,400 seats. In 1821, it became known as the Teatro Grande.

By the end of the 18th century, the need for a new theatre in Trieste became evident. Its main theatre, the Teatro di San Pietro, had become increasingly inadequate and finally closed its doors in 1800. A proposal to the Austrian Chancery from Giovanni Matteo Tommasini to build a private theatre had existed since 1795 and, in June 1798, a contract was drawn up whereby annual funding would come from the municipality and Tommasini would hold the rights to several boxes and the rights to sell others. Gian Antonio Selva, the architect of the La Fenice in Venice, was engaged, and he designed a classic horseshoe-shaped auditorium. However, his exterior designs were considered to be too plain for the Austrians who then engaged another architect, Matteo Pertsch, to solve the problem, which was accomplished by incorporating elements of Milan's La Scala opera house. The "Nuovo" became a mixture of La Fenice on the inside and La Scala on the exterior.

Several name changes have occurred during the theatre's lifetime, the first in 1821 when it became the Teatro Grande and it was under this name that the theatre was the site of two Verdi opera premieres: Il corsaro in 1848 (featuring the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, who Verdi married in 1859, in the leading role) and Stiffelio, a production which Verdi supervised - not without controversy - in 1850. However, before these premieres, Verdi's operas had begun to dominate the Teatro Grande's stage, followed, as the century progressed, by all the major works of the opera repertoire, including those by Puccini and Wagner.

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