As Italy’s leading opera house, La Scala is known as a bastion of privilege and tradition where shabbily dressed tourists are unwelcome and reactionary audience members boo modern stagings of works.
Yet in a bold step into the modern age, the Milanese theatre — which was founded in 1778 and has premiered masterpieces by Bellini, Verdi and Puccini — is using modern technology to open up to the visually impaired and hard of hearing.
With complex librettos, sung texts and often larger-than-life stagings, the operatic art form poses numerous problems for people with these disabilities.
To help overcome those challenges, La Scala has published video presentations and programmes before a production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, which opened on Sunday, each with voiceovers, enlargeable subtitles, and interpretations in Italian sign language.
Additionally, there will be in-house aid for about 50 people with impaired hearing or sight at a performance of the opera on March 10.
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Before the performance, disabled audience members will be given tours of the house, helping them become familiarised with the space, while, during the performance, synopsis summaries will be played through earpieces before each scene.
While other opera houses around the world have their own similar schemes, including the Royal Opera House in London and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, La Scala is one of Italy’s first to follow suit.
“It is important that La Scala makes this step … because we have a different level of visibility, and can shine a spotlight on the issue,” it said.
Later in the season, there will be additional support for productions of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, in April, and other productions later in the year including Donizetti’s comic opera Don Pasquale and Chopin’s ballet La Dame aux Camélias.
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The development could help soften the exclusive image of the so-called “Temple to Italian Opera”, where tickets for the annual opening night of the season — attended by Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, in 2022 — cost up to €3,200 last year.
During one torrid Milanese summer, in 2017, ushers told the newspaper La Repubblica they were turning away growing numbers of tourists arriving in T-shirts and shorts, rather than the customary dark suit and tie worn by natives.
The new support scheme was developed in collaboration with the University of Macerata.
La Scala’s spokesman said that the new project was “the start of a journey”, and that lifts and more places in the auditorium for people in wheelchairs, as well as tablet screens with visual aids, could come next.
