Description

To celebrate the importance of music to Venice, we designed a new mask in the shape of a treble clef.

In the Baroque era, Venetian palaces have always been places of music as an integral part of festivities and grand receptions. Along with cantatas or allegorical serenades, performances of operas in music were held, albeit of a celebratory nature.

The representations of the operas in the palaces were reserved for a selected and limited audience, usually coming from acquaintances and friends of the noble family that had organized the event. It was in 1636 that the Venetian Tron family obtained permission to rebuild the S. Cassian Theatre and thus make it the first public opera house and no longer to a private, paying audience. It was an event that changed the history of Venetian opera.
Until that moment, in fact, public theaters, those that operated on a commercial basis, had only staged theatrical performances (i.e. ‘comedies’). Opera had remained a private spectacular form, reserved for the nobility and the courts.

The San Cassiano Theatre was therefore the first public theater to stage opera, making it available to a wider audience. It was a great event in Venice, so much so that subsequently 16 other theaters were built and during the next century Venice had the enviable European record of being the Opera City par excellence.