Opera di Firenze / Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Because May is May? For its history, first of all. The story of a body of musical theater born of a festival, in turn born of a symphony season. In the rest of Italy the Italian twentieth century has been gradually adding values ​​to the symphonic work glorious strand: a melodrama country that was always trying to fit more in Europe without losing its identity, creating symphonic seasons by itself or alongside a number more and more concerts to opera seasons.

Florence instead went along his way around the road: being born just as a European institution, with an orchestra to its creation, in 1928, it seemed only the natural consequence of the growing international dimension of a city for centuries voted as a few other art and culture. A choice bravely elitist, then: in 1933, with the first Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, which resulted in the most European of ways to make music and theater, with a festival - the first in Italy, today the oldest in Europe after Salzburg - that just starting orchestra, at the very moment in which it reaffirmed the values ​​of certain major international musical culture also indicated new ways, in the repertoire as in the general vision of the show, involving the melodrama to an extent perhaps unprecedented for Italy at the time.

A substantial continuity between the concert and opera, overcoming the old differences between concert for the elite and popular work, also inspired the formation of the institution of which the musical theater May is expression and flag. So today "May" means a proposal, innovation, internationality, interdisciplinary vision of music and entertainment, concerts and exhibitions, opera nights and meetings of study.

living culture, in a word, and just in the city of monuments and museums, rich in a past so strong as to risk condition it. At the May parade for decades all the biggest names of the music show, in an osmosis deepening between the true festival itself and all other assets distributed in the year, in the historic theaters like the new Opera that Florence has date: many of these have gradually also linked to the city and in May with long and fruitful. But today, as yesterday it has never treated merely a parade of stars: each has helped the public of May, and through this a bit 'all, to know and understand more.

(© Daniele Spini - Playing reserved)