ROME — For months the Piccola Lirica company has been staging "Tosca" here, as its slogan says, "in miniatura." The other night I stopped by to see it. It lasted about as long as some Italian governments: in just 90 minutes Scarpia was dead, Tosca had hurled herself off the parapet, and the audience was back strolling the streets, hunting for the perfect linguine alle vongole.
In America one of the few bright spots for classical music now is said to be opera, with younger crowds attracted by trendy marketing and new works often dealing with topical issues. But it's another story in the country of Verdi and Puccini, where, like Mimi, opera has been dying forever. When the soprano Cecilia Bartoli recently told a German newspaper that "opera in Italy is a museum with dusty exhibits," she echoed the composer Luciano Berio, who in exasperation a dozen years ago called Italian opera administrators "cretins" and said half the Italian opera houses should be closed because production standards had fallen so low.
Walter Vergnano, who is general manager of the Turin Opera Theater and president of the association of Italy's state opera companies, maintains that it isn’t really dying[....]But young Italians don't go to operas, he admitted, and new productions are rare. "It’s a consequence of the fact that musical education is missing," he said. "This could seem strange to an American because we're known as the land of music, but it's true. What it means is that the public that goes to the opera is older than in other countries."
Even older, he might have said -- never mind that generations weaned on Italian television and Euro-pop are bound to be unaccustomed to serious culture.
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