Tour of the exhibition I
Tours are in German only. Please register via puccini@bertelsmann.de.
Puccini, Ricordi and the Rise of the Modern Entertainment Industry
18/4 – 16/5/2024 Berlin
About The Exhibition
OPERA MEETS NEW MEDIA – Bertelsmann presents the interplay of opera and media in the early 20th century in a multimedia exhibition to mark the 100th anniversary of Giacomo Puccini’s death. Numerous original documents from the Archivio Storico Ricordi, which is part of Bertelsmann, are also on display.
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) conquered the whole world with his music. His operas have been among the world’s most frequently performed works for over 100 years without interruption. The timeless, emotional Puccini sound continues to inspire and touch people to this day.
Puccini celebrated his greatest successes at a time of revolutionary media innovations. The development of new entertainment technology, first and foremost film and sound recordings, which soon became widespread, represented a revolution for society and musical culture in the early 20th century, fundamentally challenging the traditional business model of musical theater. It multiplied the distribution of dramatic music and popularized it to an unprecedented extent within just a few years.
The exhibition OPERA MEETS NEW MEDIA – Puccini, Ricordi and the Rise of the Modern Entertainment Industry seeks to uncover the secret of this unprecedented success. It tells of the disruptive forces of new media and their impact; it tells how the artist Puccini and his publisher Ricordi used these times of change to build an international star with the help of modern marketing campaigns; but it also reveals how fundamentally contemporary developments changed the opera business forever.
The exhibition presents this very topical and relevant subject in several audiovisual installations: From the digital 3D modeling of a Puccini portrait to the AI animation of contemporary stage sets. Numerous original documents from the Archivio Storico Ricordi, which is owned by Bertelsmann, are also on display – and most of them are being shown in Germany for the first time.
Impressions
Events
Tour of the exhibition II
Tours are in German only. Please register via puccini@bertelsmann.de.
Zeughauskino: Cinema von „La Bohème“ (1926)
Bertelsmann und das Zeughauskino präsentieren King Vidors selten gezeigte Stummfilmadaptation von La Bohème mit Livemusikbegleitung. Im Anschluss an den Film führen wir durch die Ausstellung.
Tour of the exhibition III
Tours are in German only. Please register via puccini@bertelsmann.de.
Voices
News
World Premiere in the Puccini Year: Bertelsmann Presents Multimedia Exhibition in Berlin
“Opera Meets New Media – Puccini, Ricordi, and the Rise of the Modern Entertainment Industry” on the interaction between opera and media in the 20th century // Original documents from Bertelsmann-owned Archivio Storico Ricordi travel to Germany for the first time // Thomas Rabe: “An exhibition about how technological innovations disrupt conventional art forms and create new ones.” // The exhibition can be seen daily at Bertelsmann Unter den Linden 1 from April 18 to May 16
The Hosts
On the history of one of the world’s most important music archives
The Archivio Storico Ricordi in Milan houses one of the world’s most important collections of Puccini manuscripts. This archive contains not only most of the opera scores by the most famous Italian opera composer after Verdi, but also several hundred letters, hundreds of libretti, dozens of photographs, and more than 700 sketches of costumes and stage sets from early opera performances.
This unique collection – in addition to its Puccini collection, the Archivio also holds extensive documents on Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini and Giuseppe Verdi – is part of the legacy of the music publisher Casa Ricordi.
Founded by Giovanni Ricordi in Milan in 1808, Casa Ricordi shaped the history of music in Italy and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries like no other publisher. Its publishing activities, meticulously documented from the very beginning, reflect a unique symbiosis of entrepreneurship and creativity, and form the content basis of the collection, which comprises at least 200,000 documents in total.
The Archivio Storico Ricordi was taken over by Bertelsmann with its acquisition of Casa Ricordi in 1994 and remained with the international media, services, and education company even after the resale of the then music rights division in 2006. It has since been made accessible to research and academe, but above all to the public. Thanks to numerous collaborations, exhibitions, and digitization projects, its extraordinarily dense holdings are now also known to a broad international audience.
As national cultural heritage, the Archivio Storico Ricordi is protected by cultural legislation and as such under the tutelage of the Ministry of Culture.
Bertelsmann is aware of the great responsibility that comes with owning this valuable cultural asset and continues to cherish and cultivate the tradition associated with the Ricordi name.
Bertelsmann
Archivio Storico Ricordi
Media Partner
