The form of art known as Opera originates in Italy, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Originally, opera was originally restricted to private performances, primarily for the richer, upper class, and aristocracy, but luckily the people of Venice saw no purpose in segregating opera from the people. Thus, a new hit was born.
Teatro di San Cassiano, the first ever public opera house was built in Venice, 1637. Owned by the Venetian Tron family, whose most regarded member, Nicolò Tron, was the Doge of Venice (Duke of Venice) from 1471 to 1473, when Venice was still its’ own Republic. Francesco and Ettore Tron were the proud owners the wonderful theater. The theater itself was not actually the original, it was rebuilt from the ground up. The original theater, was similarly the very first public theater for spoken plays, which was built in 1581. The building was tragically set ablaze in 1969. Coincidentally, it ended up being rebuilt to be the first ever public opera house.
The first operas performed in Teatro di San Cassiano were L’Andromeda, produced by the Italian composer Benedetto Ferrari, and La Maga Fulminata, produced by the Roman Baroque composer Francesco Manelli. With opera becoming exponentially more popular, ten more opera houses were built, nearing the beginning of the 18th century, at which point Venice was considered to be the ‘Opera capital of the World.’
Alas, Teatro di San Cassiano is no longer around. It saw its’ last performance in 1807, and was demolished in 1812 due to recurring fires. The same event that brought life to Teatro di San Cassiano, is also what took its’ magnificence out of this world.
To this day, there are now four functioning theater/opera houses in Venice – La Fenice (1792), Teatro Goldoni (1622), Teatro Malibran (1678), and Theatre Fondamenta Nuove (1998).
Sources/References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_opera
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_opera#Venice:_commercial_opera
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_family
Cities and Their Music 
I think it’s really interesting how they decided to built the first public opera house on top of the ruins of a theater! It’s also very ironic in a sense due to them both being arts that in that time were considered more for the upper class but in Venice were open to everyone. I only wonder what caused all of the fires that happened over time, there had to be something up with the structure or material of the building that would make it so prone to burning down.
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