The musical life of modern Sassari grew out of two institutions: the “Luigi Canepa” Music School, founded in 1880, and the concert society that would in time become the Ente Concerti “Marialisa De Carolis”. For many years their histories ran together, and it is there that the origins of the present-day Ente are to be found.
A founder
In 1938 Marialisa De Carolis arrived in Sassari at the age of twenty-six, having won the competition for the directorship of the city’s Liceo Musicale and its chair of piano. Born in Rome in 1912, trained at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia and subsequently under Alfredo Casella for piano and Alessandro Bustini for composition, she found a city with a large and demanding opera public but almost no public life for instrumental and chamber music, which remained largely confined to private salons. In 1942 she founded the Società dei Concerti, renamed in 1948 after Casella in memory of the composer, who had died the previous year.
From concert society to opera house
On 15 January 1950 the society absorbed the rival Filarmonica Sassarese and adopted the name Ente Concerti, with Marialisa De Carolis as artistic director — a merger encouraged by the national Direzione Generale dello Spettacolo in order to open access to State funding. In 1952, with a State grant covering eight performances, the Ente presented its first opera season: the single most decisive step in its history. Marialisa De Carolis died while that season was still running, and the institution has carried her name ever since.
National recognition
The 1967 reform of Italy’s musical institutions affirmed the public character of the sector and, under article 28, listed the Ente Concerti among the nation’s “Teatri di Tradizione” — formal recognition of its role as custodian of Sassari’s long operatic tradition. In 1975 the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment and AGIS awarded the Ente a diploma of merit “for its meritorious work in the diffusion and advancement of musical art and culture”.
Artistic direction
Nino Bonavolontà succeeded the founder and led the Ente until 1978; it was under his direction that the Incontri con l’Opera were created, public introductions to each production with the participation of its conductor and stage director. Alberto Peyretti followed for fifteen years, consolidating a tradition by then deeply rooted in the city, and was succeeded in 1995 by the conductor Elisabetta Maschio. From 1998 the critic and musicologist Marco Spada guided the Ente through the institutional reform of the Teatri di Tradizione at the turn of the century, renewing the repertoire and opening the theatre to partnerships with other cultural bodies and with the media. In 2017 the Sassari-born composer Stefano Garau became the first Sardinian to hold the post. Since 2023 the artistic direction has been entrusted to Alberto Gazale, baritone and stage director, an interpreter of more than seventy roles in the world’s leading theatres and professor of opera singing at the Sassari Conservatory.
The Ente today
What began as a single winter opera season has become a year-round activity that now reaches across the whole of Sardinia. The 2026 season runs from July to December and comprises seven productions. At its centre is the traditional opera season at the Teatro Comunale in Sassari — Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Verdi’s Don Carlo and Rigoletto — flanked by Mahler’s Third Symphony and the Christmas Concert.
The summer of 2026 marked two significant openings. In Alghero the Ente inaugurated the Festival Lirico, staged in the open air at the Bastione La Maddalenetta with Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, and established under a three-year agreement with the City of Alghero. In parallel, the Città Regie festival carried a programme of concerts to the historic royal cities and principal centres of the island, extending the theatre’s work well beyond its home stage.
Productions are increasingly built through co-operation with partner theatres in Italy and abroad, and the Ente today welcomes an audience of close to twenty thousand each year — a scale that confirms the vitality of a tradition now more than seventy years old.
