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In the pitch-dark auditorium of Rome’s Teatro Costanzi, a high-pitched lament floated from the highest galleries. Dozens of flashlights snapped on, their beams crisscrossing crazily, looking for the supply of the sound.
The shafts of sunshine homed in on a spectral determine — a slim, dark-haired lady wearing white, shifting at a funereal tempo and plaintively singing. In the viewers, 130-odd kids, ages 8 to 10, let unfastened squeals, some gasps, and one “it’s not actual.” Several referred to as out “Emma, Emma.”
The kids had simply been advised that the Costanzi, the capital’s opera home, had a resident phantom. No, not that one. This was mentioned to be the spirit of Emma Carelli, an Italian soprano who managed the theater a century in the past, and liked it a lot that she was loath to depart it, even in demise.
“The theater is a spot the place unusual issues occur, the place what’s not possible turns into potential,” Francesco Giambrone, the Costanzi’s normal manager, advised the kids Saturday afternoon once they arrived to take part in a get-to-know-the-theater-sleepover.
Music schooling ranks as a low precedence in Italy, the nation that invented opera and gave the world a few of its best composers. Many consultants, together with Mr. Giambrone, say their nation has rested on its appreciable laurels quite than domesticate a musical tradition that encourages college students to find out about their illustrious heritage.
With little backing from faculties or lawmakers, arts organizations just like the Costanzi have concluded that it’s as much as them to achieve out to the younger.
Mr. Giambrone sought to dispel opera’s stuffy picture by abandoning the style’s strict gown code. That change, just like the sleepover, is a part of his effort to make opera, usually seen as an elitist, intellectual and abstruse artwork type for the initiated, extra acquainted and accessible, particularly to kids.
“We consider that the theater ought to be for everybody, and that it ought to make individuals really feel at residence,” Mr. Giambrone mentioned in an interview. Hence the choice to welcome kids to eat, sleep and play there. “Once a theater is a house, it’s not one thing distant, one thing a bit austere to concern, or someplace you’re feeling insufficient,” he mentioned.
“There’s a whole lot of speak about Made in Italy, however actual shortsightedness in terms of our musical patrimony, which is envied all through the world,” mentioned Maestro Antonio Caroccia, who teaches music historical past on the Santa Cecilia conservatory in Rome. He mentioned that “politicians are deaf to it.”
“Italy is much behind” many different nations, mentioned Barbara Minghetti, of Opera Education, which creates applications for kids. “This I can assure.”
When he was in Italy’s Parliament, Michele Nitti, a musician and former lawmaker with the 5 Star Movement, proposed a legislation including musical schooling to highschool curricula. His invoice by no means made it to a parliamentary vote.
He mentioned that not even Giuseppe Verdi, the nineteenth century composer who additionally served in Parliament, was in a position, in his time, to get his fellow lawmakers to assist music schooling in faculties.
Mr. Nitti was additionally unsuccessful in getting lawmakers to declare opera singing a nationwide treasure. He did assist the nation’s profitable bid to have the observe of opera singing in Italy placed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
“Oh nicely,” he mentioned.
Rather than letting its opera tradition wither, Mr. Giambrone mentioned, “Italy ought to be instructing different nations the way it’s carried out.”
At the Teatro Costanzi, greater than half of the kids on the sleepover belonged to scout troops from Rome’s outlying neighborhoods. They have been accompanied by coolheaded scout leaders who — impressively — commanded silence simply by elevating a finger.
Most of the kids had by no means visited the theater earlier than. “Come to consider it, I haven’t been there both,” mentioned Gianpaolo Ricciarelli, one of many dad and mom who dropped off his son.
Another father, Armando Cereoli, mentioned, “Between video video games, cellphones and Netflix, there’s robust competitors to get youngsters excited by lovely issues.”
Some of the kids got here from deprived neighborhoods, so the go to was “an opportunity to free their minds and to dream,” mentioned Sara Greci, a scout chief and Red Cross employee who introduced 4 ladies from a house for abused ladies and their kids.
The opera home runs a number of outreach applications for the homeless or individuals who dwell in Rome’s most far-flung neighborhoods, a strategy to open the theater to town and broaden its attain, mentioned Andrea Bonadio, who was employed by the theater to work on such applications.
Nunzia Nigro, the theater’s director for advertising and schooling, mentioned that a number of of the kids who had participated within the theater’s instructional applications over the previous 25 years have been loyal patrons in the present day. “We’re starting to reap a few of these efforts, and have a youthful public,” she mentioned.
Ms. Nigro helped set up the sleepover, tailoring it for 8- to 10-year-olds — sufficiently old to sleep away from residence however not sufficiently old to have hormones kick in, she mentioned. As it was, two boys felt homesick sufficient to get their mothers to choose them up.
On Saturday, the kids watched a part of a rehearsal for an upcoming efficiency of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony — “the conductor makes use of a wand to direct music, not so totally different from Harry Potter’s however extra essential,” Ms. Nigro mentioned. They realized how the employees cleaned the world’s greatest chandelier in a historic constructing, and so they acquired to know the ins and outs of the theater by way of a treasure hunt (learn normal mayhem) that had them scrambling up and down stairs, flitting out and in of stalls like a multicharacter French farce.
Emma the phantom — Valentina Gargano, a soprano within the opera’s younger artists program — made an encore, exacting a promise from the kids that they’d inform their buddies about “this magic place” and are available again once they grew up.
One woman had been so satisfied that Ms. Gargano was an actual ghost that the organizers made positive they met when the soprano was in avenue garments.
After being serenaded with music, together with Brahms’ basic lullaby, the kids settled down (or tried to) in a patchwork of sleeping baggage on a man-made inexperienced garden utilized in a earlier manufacturing of Madama Butterfly. Above them loomed oversize photographs of among the stars who carried out on the Costanzi, like Maria Callas, Herbert von Karajan and Rudolf Nureyev.
After breakfast on Sunday, the kids took half in workshops at which they designed colourful paper ballet costumes, realized fundamental ballet positions, sang as a part of a choir (some extra enthusiastically than others) and performed an opera-themed model of snakes and ladders. The sport was designed and overseen by Giordano Punturo, the opera’s stage manager, carried out up in a tuxedo and colourful high hat.
He didn’t know in regards to the youngsters, he mentioned, “however I had the time of my life.”
After a bunch singalong and photograph, it was nearly time to go residence.
“Did you’ve gotten enjoyable?” Mr. Giambrone requested the children. “Yes!!” they cheered. “Did you sleep nicely?” he requested, to a extra combined response. Several “No “s have been notably heard. Come again quickly, he mentioned.
After hugging his dad and mom who had come to choose him up, Andrea Quadrini, nearly 11, couldn’t wait to inform them that his workforce had gained at snakes and ladders, and that the treasure hunt had been particularly enjoyable.
“Wow,” he mentioned. “I noticed an opera theater for the primary time.”
