Teatro Comunale Florence
Encyclopedia
The Teatro Comunale di Firenze (or Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino) is an opera house
Opera house
An opera house is a theatre building used for opera performances that consists of a stage, an orchestra pit, audience seating, and backstage facilities for costumes and set building...

 in Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. It was originally built as the open-air amphitheatre, the Politeama Fiorentino Vittorio Emanuele which was inaugurated on 17 May 1862 with a production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor
Lucia di Lammermoor
Lucia di Lammermoor is a dramma tragico in three acts by Gaetano Donizetti. Salvadore Cammarano wrote the Italian language libretto loosely based upon Sir Walter Scott's historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor....

and which seated 6,000 people. It became the focus on cultural life in the city. After closure caused by fire, it reopened in April 1864 and acquired a roof in 1882. By 1911 it had both electricity and heating.

In 1930 the building was taken over by the city authorities who renamed it the Teatro Comunale. Bombing during the Second World War damaged the building once again, and other problems closed it for three years in 1958. Finally, in May 1961, the then-modernized theatre re-opened with Verdi's Don Carlo. It had become a 2,000 seat elliptically shaped auditorium consisting of a large orchestra section, one tier of boxes, and two wide semicircular galleries, which betray the building's amphitheatre origins.

As the theatre became more closely associated with Italy's first and most important music festival, the annual Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is an annual opera festival which was founded in April 1933 by conductor Vittorio Gui with the aim of presenting contemporary and forgotten operas in visually dramatic productions. It was the first music festival in Italy. The first opera presented was Verdi's early...

which had begun in 1931 as a triennial festival and, except for the war years, became an annual one after 1937, so its name was changed once again for the festivals to the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

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