‘Nothing But Positive Feedback’
The exhibition “Puccini – Opera Meets New Media” by Bertelsmann’s Milan-based Archivio Storico Ricordi has been on display at La Scala in Milan since October 24. Having already attracted thousands of visitors to the Bertelsmann Unter den Linden 1 in Berlin, the exhibition is proving to be a crowd-puller in Milan as well. CEO Thomas Rabe recently visited the exhibition at La Scala and the Archivio Storico Ricordi.
The exhibition “Puccini – Opera Meets New Media” by the Milan-based Archivio Storico Ricordi, which is part of Bertelsmann, opened nearly a month ago at Milan’s La Scala, the world’s most famous opera house, to a tremendous and consistently positive response in the Italian press and cultural landscape. This spring, some 10,000 visitors had already experienced the multimedia exhibition featuring valuable original documents at Bertelsmann Unter den Linden 1 in Berlin. The occasion for the elaborate show is the centenary this month of famous opera composer Giacomo Puccini’s death. And it is already clear that not only the Italian press but also visitors to the La Scala Museum in Milan, where “Puccini – Opera Meets New Media” is being shown, love the exhibition.
Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Rabe saw this for himself when he recently visited the Milan exhibition and the Archivio Storico Ricordi. The archive is part of Bertelsmann Corporate Communications under the direction of Karin Schlautmann, who also took part in the tour. It is regarded as one of the most important music collections in the world, containing a wealth of unique testimonies from 200 years of Italian opera history. At La Scala in Milan, Thomas Rabe was welcomed by Dominique Meyer, the artistic director of the opera house. Donatella Brunazzi, Director of the La Scala Museum, and Pierluigi Ledda, Managing Director of the Archivio Storico Ricordi, then gave a guided tour of the Puccini exhibition. “Puccini – Opera Meets New Media” is already a huge success, emphasized Brunazzi, noting that she has received nothing but positive feedback from visitors to the museum. And the number of visitors is even significantly higher than usual at this time of year.
“As the owner of the Ricordi archive, we are very aware of the importance of this world-class cultural treasure and take responsibility for its long-term preservation, maintenance and development,” Rabe had already declared when the exhibition first opened. He said he was delighted that “Puccini – Opera Meets New Media” can now be seen at La Scala as well, a location that was of outstanding importance for the music publisher Ricordi, the composer Puccini, and the opera world as a whole at the time – and continues to be so today.
The Casa Ricordi publishing house was founded in the vicinity of Milan’s renowned opera house, and in 1825, the company’s founder Giovanni Ricordi even took over the opera house’s archives, which were already important at the time. Many of the operas published by Casa Ricordi were premiered at the nearby Teatro alla Scala. The La Scala museum, the “Museo Teatrale alla Scala,” is one of the most visited museums in Milan: With more than 260,000 visitors a year, it is one of the most important institutions in Milan’s cultural life. “The La Scala museum is simply the perfect place for our Puccini exhibition,” concluded Karin Schlautmann.
“Puccini – Opera Meets New Media” shows the interplay between opera and media in the early 20th century. Curated with great care by Gabriele Dotto, Ellen Lockhart, and Christy Thomas Adams, the show tells the story of the extraordinary symbiosis of commercial activity and artistic creation that characterized Puccini and his publisher, Casa Ricordi, in the last century. Exhibits and installations also tell of the challenges the then “new media” faced in connection with existing copyright law and the exploitation of rights. The exhibition will be on display at La Scala in Milan until January 12, 2025. Further stops are planned, including in Gütersloh in autumn 2025. Numerous events at various cultural institutions in Milan have been organized to accompany the show before and during the exhibition period. Under the editorship of curator Gabriele Dotto, Prestel, a Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe imprint, has published a richly illustrated publication to accompany the exhibition, initially in German and English, and now also in Italian.
Besides the Puccini exhibition, Thomas Rabe also visited the Archivio Storico Ricordi, which has been part of Bertelsmann since 1994 and has since been housed in Milan’s important National Library, the Bibliotheca Braidense. The Puccini exhibition is one of the Archivio team’s most elaborate projects to date; the team has been working on an extensive reorganization of the archive since 2011. Other projects include an extensive digitization project, which in recent years has made a significant contribution to making the archive’s valuable content more accessible to researchers and the general public. A broad community has been established that is helping with the indexing of the archive through transcription projects and “hackathons,” among other things. Rabe’s visit to the Archivio Ricordi concluded with a meeting with the director of the Bibliotheca Braidense, Angelo Crespi, and his deputy, Chiara Rostagno. They both emphasized the excellent cooperation with the Archivio, calling it a great value-add for the library as well as for the artistic district of Brera, where the library is located. They noted that the library is also currently developing into a center for modern art and music, which in turn also opens up great opportunities for the Archivio Storico Ricordi.
