LA SCALA OPENING NIGHT

La Scala Opening Night is the first night of the opera season at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, given every year on 7 December, the feast of Saint Ambrose, the city’s patron: a new production, begun at six in the evening, before a house that has dressed for it, in a theatre that faces the city hall across Piazza della Scala. The Milanese call it the Prima. It has opened on the saint’s day since 1951, and the date has held even in an empty theatre.

In 1968 students waited outside with eggs for the furs.

The Saint's Day

The theatre was built after the Teatro Ducale burned in 1776, by the will of the Empress Maria Theresa, to designs by Giuseppe Piermarini, on the site of the church of Santa Maria alla Scala. It opened in 1778 with Salieri’s L’Europa riconosciuta. After the wartime bombing Toscanini reopened the rebuilt hall on 11 May 1946.

The season used to open on 26 December. In 1951 Victor De Sabata, the artistic director, moved it to 7 December, Sant’Ambrogio, and the house says that this is in part where the evening’s symbolic, and more than musical, weight comes from. That first night was Verdi’s I vespri siciliani, with Maria Callas, months after her debut in the house as a replacement for Renata Tebaldi in Aida; she came back in 1952 with Macbeth. The evening became known as “la più mondana della città”, the most worldly in the city. A committee of tailors judged the most elegant lady in the foyer and gave her a gown; the Countess Dompé won it with “India misteriosa”. In 1960 Onassis came to hear Callas in Donizetti’s Poliuto, with Grace and Rainier of Monaco, and Pierre Balmain gave the flowers for the boxes.

Then came the protests. In 1965 leaflets rained from the loggione at the end of the first act of La forza del destino. In 1968 the theatre announced that evening dress would not be required, and some guests came in tails regardless; outside, students threw eggs at the furs, and after an egg hit a gentleman’s dinner jacket came “uova, cachi, vernice rossa”, eggs, persimmons and red paint. In 1972 the superintendent, Paolo Grassi, defended the dark suit: «Nei paesi comunisti nessuno si sogna di presentarsi in pullover. L’abito scuro è un segno di rispetto per chi lavora in teatro», that in communist countries nobody dreams of turning up in a pullover, and that the dark suit is a mark of respect for those who work in the theatre.

On 7 December 2004 Riccardo Muti reopened the restored theatre with L’Europa riconosciuta, the opera of 1778. In 2020, with the house closed by the pandemic, the Scala kept its date with a televised show, A riveder le stelle, given in an empty theatre.

The Prima

The gallery is the judge. The loggione booed Luciano Pavarotti on Sant’Ambrogio 1992, after he cracked a note in Don Carlo under Muti, and in 2013 told the director of La traviata, Dmitri Tcherniakov, «vai a casa», go home.

The curtain rises at six on the opening night, two hours earlier than on the nights that follow. An hour before each performance a lecture on the opera is given in the Ridotti, the foyers. A few days before the Prima, the production is given for an audience under thirty.

The Prima is carried by corporate partners, who take places for the evening through the house. One hundred and forty seats in the gallery are sold through an association, L’Accordo, and gallery ticket-holders enter by the Museum entrance on Largo Ghiringhelli.

On 7 December 2025 the season opened with Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk under Riccardo Chailly, and the house applauded for “11 minuti”. On Monday 7 December 2026 it opens with Verdi’s Otello, written for La Scala and first given there in 1887, in a new production by Damiano Michieletto, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung in his first season as music director, with Brian Jagde as Otello, Eleonora Buratto as Desdemona and Luca Salsi as Iago. The preview for those under thirty is on 4 December, and the production runs on from 10 December to 5 January 2027.

What to Know

It is always on 7 December, at six in the evening. In March 2026 the Scala’s board chose Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera for 7 December 2027, conducted by Chung and directed by Luca Guadagnino; the house has not yet published the season.

The dearest seats for the Prima, in the stalls and the boxes, rose in 2026 by about a tenth, from €3,000 to about €3,300. Tickets for the later performances of Otello go on sale on 14 October 2026 at one in the afternoon. The house sells only through its own site, and says that no reseller can hold a ticket before the official sale.

Black tie. The house publishes no code for the opening night beyond its rule for every performance, dress “in keeping with the decorum of the Theatre”, with shorts and sleeveless shirts turned away; the Prima has been an evening of evening dress since its first years, and the Court dresses to it. Arrive at least twenty minutes before the curtain.

The theatre stands in Piazza della Scala, opposite Palazzo Marino, the city hall.

The mistake is to buy from anyone but the Scala. Unauthorised sites offer seats for the Prima at inflated prices, and the house warns that none of them can hold a ticket before its own sale.

The Court

La Scala Opening Night is not the Court’s own. Seats in the stalls or a box for the Prima are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Milan, and the table afterward.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.