Creative Europe
Desk UK
for Culture

Opera is a collective European heritage as well as a key living art. This art form is part of our common culture since its birth, in the early 17th century, when the renewed interest towards classical tragedy led to experiment something totally new. In the music field, it is increasingly difficult for cultural organisers, and theatres in particular, to built programmes ensuring high-quality productions. This particularly concerns opera: a complex and expensive art form, involving many artists and professionals, yet one of the highest expression of European culture and creativity, recognised and loved worldwide. By the combined effort of a group of European cultural institutions, with different strengths and backgrounds, working closely together, the project aims to develop an innovative, international model of operatic production, testing it on a beautiful but forgotten opera by C.W. Gluck. The project assumes that a flexible, cost-efficient production model – designed to be easily adapted to different venues and even to site-specific situations – meets a strong potential demand throughout Europe, makes high-quality opera more affordable by cultural organisers and accessible to the public, and is crucial to the future of this extraordinary art form. In a way, TAO! intends to develop high-end “ready-to-perform” productions, as distinct from “bespoke” productions tailored to a particular theatre’s frame, believing that it will be increasingly prohibitive, even for major theatres, to embark in several new high-quality productions, for just a few performances.