The symposium fostered dialogue between research, teaching and artistic practice, focusing on the rethinking of opera through digital technologies and new models of higher education. A transdisciplinary vision of opera emerged, understood as a system integrating music, stagecraft, visual arts and immersive environments, alongside the experimentation of educational models based on artistic production.
The potential of emerging technologies applied to music theatre was also discussed, and experiences and case studies developed within the PNRR framework were presented. Overall, the meeting highlighted an approach to opera as a dynamic field in which tradition and innovation intertwine within contemporary educational and creative processes.
Within the framework of the symposium, a first presentation took place featuring a 20-minute excerpt from the film-opera Exchanges, written and directed by Stefano Patarino in the framework of the ROLE Project. The work was produced by the Padua Conservatory in collaboration with HOGENT (KASK & Conservatorium) in Ghent (Belgium), the Association Européenne des Conservatoires (AEC) in Brussels, and FilmArt Studio in Padua, with a cast including both staff and students from various countries (Japan, Albania, the Netherlands, Belgium, China, Italy, Spain and Slovakia).
The screening was preceded by a talk by Professor Patarino, who contextualised the work and its potential value from the perspective of artistic research. Although the film originated as an autonomous artistic production, its structure and creative process suggest the possibility of reinterpreting it within replicable research practices in academic contexts. The work occupies a liminal space between film-opera and fiction film, configuring itself as a hybrid object: an explicit dialogue between different artistic languages, offering new possibilities in terms of audience reception and engagement with opera, while becoming both a tool and an outcome of research.
The official premiere of Exchanges subsequently took place in Padua on Wednesday 8 April at the Civic Cinema Hall “Fronte del Porto” (200 seats), part of the Cinema Porto Astra complex, which was completely sold out. The event formed part of the 2026 edition of the Mozart@Padova festival.
The film, which reimagines and reinvents Così fan tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – at the heart of a narrative rich in parallels and intersections between reality and staged fiction – tells the story of a group of students involved in an international cooperation programme aimed at staging Mozart’s dramma giocoso. Exchanges is now available worldwide via the “Pollini” Conservatory’s channels, in two versions with English and Italian subtitles.
Born out of the creative energy of the “Pollini”, Exchanges was funded through the project “Music Theatre and New Technologies – Toward a New Paradigm in Opera Studies and Performance”, selected under a call issued by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) within the framework of the PNRR, dedicated to the internationalisation of Higher Artistic, Musical and Dance Education (AFAM) institutions. MTNT is the result of collaboration within a consortium of twelve institutions (including universities, conservatories and academies of fine arts, both national and international), led by the “Agostino Steffani” Conservatory in Castelfranco Veneto (Treviso).
The same project also includes the digitisation of manuscripts from the Archive of the Teatro Nuovo in Padua (now Teatro Verdi), donated to the “Cesare Pollini” Conservatory in 1936. In March, this initiative led to the publication on the University of Padua’s Phaidra platform of the first five theatrical works – staged between 1773 and 1776 – from this valuable collection.
The project involves the digitisation and online publication of the complete collection of 97 theatrical compositions performed in Padua between 1773 and 1838.
The works have been made available in PDF format: following the completion of digitisation and image verification, the upload to Phaidra has now begun. The activity is naturally ongoing, and further theatrical compositions are already available for consultation.
