From Wagner to Wagner: reminiscences of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in the reconstruction of the Carlo Felice Opera House in Genoa

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, in the context of an extensive project to reform opera, German composer Richard Wagner began to envision a new kind of theater building that finally saw the light in 1876 in Bayreuth as the Festspielhaus. In the following century, Italian architect Aldo Rossi evoked its characteristic features in his reconstruction project of the Carlo Felice Opera House in Genoa, a building that had been partially destroyed during World War II and was reopened to the public in 1991. At the same time, he restored the relationship between architecture and the city that Wagnerian precepts had more or less consciously eliminated. By revisiting the time that separates the two buildings, and specifically the changes that the most important playhouses underwent, this essay attempts to capture the distinctive elements of the Wagnerian playhouse in order to evaluate what remains of them, what was omitted, and what was subtracted from later buildings that either exist only as projects or that were in fact actualized.