Charles III of Naples (1716–1788) was twenty-one when he ordered a new opera house to replace the Teatro San Bartolomeo, which had been the city’s main lyric venue since 1621. He had been king for two years. What he wanted from the commission, beyond the obvious fact of a grander building, is harder to say — but Giovanni Antonio Medrano (1703–1760) and Angelo Carasale (d. 1742) delivered it fast, and on 4 November 1737 the Teatro di San Carlo opened. It would be forty-one years before Milan built the Teatro alla Scala, fifty-five before Venice completed La Fenice. Those two houses now tend to define Italian opera in the European memory; San Carlo, curiously, comes third in a list of two.
The inaugural opera was Domenico Sarro’s (1679–1744) Achille in Sciro, to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782). Naples received it warmly and then largely forgot it, which is the usual fate of works chosen to open buildings rather than for any other reason.
The composers who followed filled in a picture that had no obvious precedent. Leonardo Leo (1694–1744), Niccolò Porpora (1686–1768), Leonardo Vinci (1690–1730), Johann Adolf Hasse (1699–1783), Gaetano Latilla (1711–1788), Niccolò Jommelli (1714–1774), Baldassarre Galuppi (1706–1785), Niccolò Piccinni (1728–1800), Antonio Sacchini (1730–1786), Tommaso Traetta (1727–1779), Giacomo Tritto (1733–1824), Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816), and Domenico Cimarosa (1749–1801) all worked at San Carlo — a concentration of talent in a single house that tells where the centre of gravity in mid-eighteenth-century opera actually lay.
Composers came from further afield too. Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) premiered La clemenza di Tito there in 1752; Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782) brought Catone in Utica in 1761 and Alessandro nell’Indie the year after. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was in Naples in 1770 and saw Jommelli’s L’Armida abbandonata, though what he thought of it he kept largely to himself.
References
Robinson, M.F. (1972) Naples and Neapolitan Opera. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Strohm, R. (1997) Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press