The Museum's Treasures

From this famous painting by Angelo Inganni, exposed in the Fourth Room, you can see how La Scala appeared in 1852. Pietro Verri wrote in a letter: “The façade of the new theatre is beautiful on paper, and I was pleasantly surprised when I saw it before building commenced. But now, I am somewhat displeased by it”. In 1858 the modest houses crowded around the Theatre were demolished and the current square was created. Initially called “Piazza del Teatro”, over time it became “Piazza della Scala”.It is this painting more than any other which symbolises our collections, La Scala as it was seen by the great opera composers of the nineteenth century: Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and a young Verdi.
This painting, donated to the Museum by Lorenzo Lorenzetti, is actually the second version of a previous one, exhibited in Brera in 1851, which was subsequently lost.

Depicting while sitting in front of his instrument, it's Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816) who was one of the first composers to be performed at La Scala, worked for years in St Petersburg and was the favourite composer of Napoleon.
This portrait of the composer from 1791 is by the famous painter Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun.
Written on the score is: Rond. di piano/When my beloved comes/Music by Signor Giovanni Paisiello. This is a reference to an aria from Nina, or the Girl Driven Mad by Love, very well known at the time.

But we promise you also a real instrument: so there is a rectangular spinet, with the
following inscription engraved
on the lowest note: “[Hono]frio Guaracino fecit 1667”. The painting, of Judith showing the decapitated head of Holofernes to the Jews,
is signed “AS 1669” (Photo by F.M. Colombo)

This bronze bust, a copy by Lorenz Von Gedon (stored in Monaco), depicts Richard Wagner.
One of his letters to Arrigo Boito is held in the archive and dates from the première of "Lohengrin" in Bologna. In it, the composer reveals a very important hidden detail: “I don’t know if it was a demon or a genius of the kind which takes hold of us in those decisive moments, however, I was lying sleepless in a hotel in La Spezia when the inspiration for the music for Das Rheingold  came to me”.
The composer is alluding to the prologue from the "Ring Cycle" which was successfully performed in full at La Scala, with the four operas performed in one week in 2013.

Arrigo Boito was one of the undisputed leaders of musical life in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was a literary figure and member of the Italian movement "scapigliatura". He had studied in Paris and had acquired a refined and international culture. He is remembered mainly as a librettist. He was also an important musician and composer of Mephistopheles (an opera still being staged) and Nero.
Boito was also one of the founders of this Museum and put his exceptional talents to work bring it to fruition. His brother, Camillo, was the architect who designed the Retirement Home for Musicians in Milan, subsidised and maintained for years by Giuseppe Verdi.

A great composer was also Giuseppe Verdi depicted here in a bronze bust, made on the occasion of the centenary of his death. It is a replica, with variations, of an original in terracotta now in Villa Verdi, executed in 1872-73, when Verdi was in Naples to direct the rehearsals and execution of Don Carlos and Aida at the San Carlo Theater.

Linked to Verdi's professional life is Bartolomeo Merelli, the impresario who
consented to stage Nabucodonosor, quickly abbreviated to Nabucco.
Merelli took all precautions to ensure that another failure had minimum repercussions on his business. The scenery was recycled from previous productions and above all that the opera was the last to be performed during Carnival and Lent.  Therefore, strategically, the least important.
However, the opera was an immediate, extraordinary and unquestioned success, so much so that it came to imbued with
a special significance (linked to the Risorgimento) that the most recent critical thinking says is completely false.

Precursor to the Verdi style, Gaetano Donizetti was from Bergamo and the greatest Italian opera composer of the first half of the nineteenth century, along with Vincenzo Bellini.
He was by far the most prolific composer, with 73 operas!

Among the composers portraied in the Museum's collection, there is the Sicilian Vincenzo Bellini, in this anonymous portrait. He owes his European acclaim to Milan even though his most famous opera, Norma, was booed at La Scala during a protest caused by artistic rivalries.