Appointment is from November 2022.
Rome - June 19, 2021 – Superintendent Carlo Fuortes has appointed Maestro Michele Mariotti as Music Director of Rome Opera. The assignment will start on 1 November 2022 and will last four years with Mariotti conducting at least three titles per season.
The appointment arrived after the important collaboration between Maestro Mariotti and Rome Opera: Mozart's Idomeneo re di Creta in November 2019, some symphonic concerts, including the one on the occasion of the reopening of the Theater, up to Luisa Miller by Verdi, last April.
«I am delighted that Michele Mariotti has accepted the proposal to become the new Music Director of Rome Opera. Maestro Mariotti is undoubtedly the most talented Italian conductor of his generation. His international curriculum is clear proof of this. I am sure that he will be able to lead the theater orchestra to new and prestigious achievements. I share the same idea of operatic theater with Maestro Mariotti: a place not only for great music and entertainment, but also for innovation and experimentation, for interdisciplinary encounters and dialogue, for cultural and social growth. A lively place in the city that is capable not only of entertaining, but also of representing the present world, with the questions and contradictions of the present, and of imagining the future, as often arts manage to do», said the Superintendent of Rome Opera, Carlo Fuortes.
«I gladly accept the Music Direction of the Opera di Roma, but above all with a strong sense of responsibility: I would like a theater that is more and more a mirror of our current society.
We have all changed. This strange and dramatic period that the pandemic has brought on us has deeply changed both our individual habits and our shared community. I welcome the chance to be Musical Director of the Opera di Roma with great joy, but mainly with a great sense of responsibility: I would like the theatre to always be a mirror image of our society.
We have become used to experimenting, to making music under the strangest conditions, to listening in a different way: I would like this new opening to reflect on our curiosity, to turn into a desire to seek and a will to find new paths.
That’s why I would like to propose repertories that communicate this vision and collaborate with directors who can give it theatrical life.
Daily news tells us of all sorts of violence, especially perpetuated towards the weaker ones. Fanatics kill those that don’t comply with an arranged marriage or an imposed religion, even in our own country. Musical theatre has been describing this for a long time. I therefore would like to ponder about our present through titles like Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, where fanaticism isn’t religious but political. Or through stories of oppression like in Puccini’s Suor Angelica, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, or Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero.
Without forgetting that we can and should ponder also through joy and irony, as Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi suggest.
I would like to open up to the international repertoire, because our theatres are called to an important cultural mission, one that we cannot avoid by simply falling back on what is well known and tested, or that which guarantees immediate success.
We as artists are called to a mission of public service. I can’t wait to start working on it in this prestigious theatre and in this marvelous city.
I thank the President of the Foundation and Mayor of Rome Virginia Raggi and the Superintendent Carlo Fuortes for their confidence», said Maestro Michele Mariotti.