Opera in Naples, 1944 - Introduction

In the first year of the reopening, nearly half a million Allied personnel were among the audiences at the San Carlo. (The house had over 1,600 places and there were often two performances a day. Naples, initally the main base for the 'push to the North', became the centre for rest, recuperation and demobilisation). The San Carlo venture was obviously a huge success.

The selection of documents presented here gives an indication of the scale of the operation and of the attention to detail which aided this success. Audiences on this scale do not flock to opera purely because 'there was nothing better to do'. This was not, in any case, true, even in the earliest months of occupation. There were many kinds of approved entertainment, as the welfare map indicates.

The San Carlo, however, held an easy lead in popularity. It maintained not only its exhausting schedule of fully-staged opera in house, but contributed to the seasons elsewhere, at Bari and Salerno, for example. Its orchestra gave many concerts. These often included operatic excerpts, and even full performances of 'one-acters'. The theatre also gave ballet, and occasionally hosted shows from elsewhere.

Irving Berlin singing 'My English Buddy' one night; Barbirolli conducting the next. Our Gracie, then Gigli. Stardust and Schumann. Wagner, even. It amounted to a comprehensive cultural crash course.

This was, of course, one of the aims of the venture. It was 'worker education' on a vast scale, accomplished not by dragooning, but by appealing to the ordinary person’s recognition of, and preference for, quality, when this is available and affordable, and capacity for self-education, when it is tactfully assisted.

The Allied authorities carefully fostered this. Their cultural publications must have been the salvation of the local printing industry. The San Carlo’s opera performances and its orchestra’s concerts were extensively publicised in print and relayed on the radio several times a week with commentary in English. Preferential rates were offered to the lower ranks. Programme notes in English were available. Some were written by the author Naomi Jacob, who was serving with ENSA. She also contributed the occasional series 'How to listen to Opera'.

Of course, this educative effort was also expedient in containing the exuberance of soldiery a-waking. (I have included brief extracts from John Horne Burns’s The Gallery and Norman Lewis’s Naples’44. Both are essential reading for the darker side of the Naples experience, as is Catch 22.) Opera was irreproachable. This was important at this late stage of the war when censorship was relaxed and news reporting more candid. It was comforting for the folks at home to learn that Joe and Tommy were going to the opera. And, through radio networking, they could hear the same performances themselves. It suggested that the war was drawing to a close.

For the Italian populace, the restoration of the San Carlo was a particularly tangible giving back of an heirloom; a token of the Allies' pledge 'to liberate and not to conquer'.

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The reopening of the San Carlo, which takes centre-stage here, was a small part of a much wider endeavour. Those same few months saw the restoration of thirty-nine of the city’s churches, the reopening of many galleries and public buildings, and the restoration of the University of Naples, which had been torched by the retreating Germans.

Simultaneously, the badly crippled public services were being repaired, as were the useless telephones; the empty reservoirs; the impassable roads and the derailed railstock.

The restoration of the physical infrastructure was, of course, accompanied by a parallel effort in the political sphere. The new Italian government was installed by the Allies across the Bay of Naples at Salerno. Education in Italian schools was radically reformed.

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