Porto's Real Teatro de São João opens on a prince's birthday, 1798

On the evening of Sunday 13 May 1798, crowds filled a new building on the south side of the Praça da Batalha in Porto. Many had come from out of town; even the general came from Viana. Latecomers found that every bench in the pit was already taken.2 sources2 sources

The day was the birthday of Prince João, heir to the throne, and Porto marked it, as it had the year before, with a Te Deum at the church of the Third Order of Carmo. This year the city also had a present for him: a theatre named in his honour, which the local chronicler called the theatre “of the Prince”.2 sources2 sources

The evening had three parts. First came an elogio, a short dramatic tribute to the prince, by António Soares de Azevedo, a university graduate, with the title O Mau Gosto Destruído ou o Porto Desafrontado (Bad Taste Destroyed, or Porto Avenged). Then the main play, the comedy Os Militares Heróis ou as Vivandeiras Ilustres, roughly The Hero Soldiers, or the Illustrious Camp-Followers. A farce, A Dama Astuciosa (The Cunning Lady), closed the night.1 source1 source

The chronicler took careful note of the house. Along each side ran 36 boxes in four tiers, with three more on each side above the stage itself. There was also the prince's own box, which nobody else was allowed to use, with a balcony of three arches above it.1 source1 source

In the 1790s Porto was a merchant city, rich on the trade in port wine, and was often called the “second city of the kingdom”. Its leading men measured themselves against Lisbon, the seat of the court. Lisbon had a new royal opera house, the São Carlos, opened in 1793 and named in honour of João's wife, Carlota Joaquina. Porto had nothing like it.2 sources2 sources

What it did have was an improvised stage. In 1760, for the festivities around the marriage of the future Queen Maria I, the coach houses of the Duke of Lafões's palace at the Corpo da Guarda were fitted out for operas and comedies. Until 1798 this converted coach house was the only theatre the city had. Nicola Setaro's company, which had come from Lisbon, sang four operas there in 1760.1 source1 source

Royal birthdays, births and weddings were the great public events of eighteenth-century Porto. The city council organised and paid for illuminations, bullfights, fireworks and plays, and in 1757 the military governor, João de Almada e Melo, added a mock assault on a fort for the birthday of King José I. A theatre opened on the prince's birthday fitted that tradition exactly.1 source1 source

The driving force was Francisco de Almada e Mendonça, the crown's chief magistrate in Porto, who was also behind much of the remodelling of the city's streets in the late eighteenth century. A nineteenth-century account says a group of young actors from the Corpo da Guarda went to court in 1793 to ask for royal protection for a new theatre, following a plan of his. Luísa Cymbron, a historian of music, treats that story with caution.1 source1 source

The documented steps are clearer. A royal order of 9 October 1794 approved the plans, and building began in 1796: in March according to one later source, in early May according to the chronicler of 1798. Like Lisbon's São Carlos and many Italian opera houses, it was built with private money, raised by a public sale of shares. The prospectus argued that Porto, “the second city of the Kingdom” by its size and population, could not do without “this fine school of manners and civility”.3 sources3 sources

The designer, Vincenzo Mazzoneschi (Vicente in Portuguese sources), was a set designer. He had worked in Rome between 1780 and 1791 and came to Portugal after the papal city closed its theatres in 1792. He worked at the São Carlos from the spring of 1795 to Carnival 1796, then moved to Porto, probably to watch over the building work, and returned to Lisbon in 1799. He had already designed the Teatro Principal in Málaga, opened in 1793.2 sources2 sources

Little of his work survives. His drawings for Porto were kept in the theatre's own archive and burned with it in 1908. According to Pedro Sobrado, chairman of the TNSJ in 2020, the builders reused stones from the Fernandine wall, the medieval wall around the city, and Marques da Silva's later theatre recycled them again.2 sources2 sources

Almada e Mendonça died in 1804, and the shareholders who owned the building took over its management. They ran it until the fire of 1908. Portuguese drama companies and Italian opera companies shared the stage, not always peacefully: there were quarrels in 1812 and again in 1817, when mourning for Queen Maria I closed the house and left both troupes short of money. There is no record that the state ever thought of buying it, as it bought the São Carlos in 1854.1 source1 source

Over the century opera won. Until the end of the nineteenth century every opera performance in Porto took place at the São João. Seasons depended on impresarios, some of whom went bankrupt in mid-season, and they settled into a regular autumn opening only in the 1850s.2 sources2 sources

Money was always short. In 1827 a decree gave the theatre the surplus income of the Ponte das Barcas, the bridge of boats over the Douro. A judge in Porto reported that this was not enough: the Italian company's impresario wanted 8 to 12 contos a year (a conto was a million réis). From 1839 the state paid the company 4 contos a year, a fifth of what the São Carlos received in Lisbon.1 source1 source

Subsidies brought supervision. The liberals, who favoured a constitution, beat the absolutist government of King Miguel in a civil war that ended in 1834, and in 1836 the new state set up an Inspectorate-General of Theatres. In Porto an edict from the district's administrator on 1 January 1838 put a detachment of the municipal guard in the theatre at every performance. Walking sticks and umbrellas went to the cloakroom, servants were to keep out of the corridors, and nobody was to smoke in the boxes, the pit or on the stairs.2 sources2 sources

Porto made do. Its impresarios hired scores, scenery and even stage machinists from the São Carlos, and sometimes used pirated music: for Verdi's I Due Foscari in the 1848 to 1849 season, players in the orchestra scored the opera themselves from a piano reduction. According to the historian John Rosselli, Porto was one of the places outside Italy where singers were paid least, so big names rarely came, except at the start or the end of their careers.1 source1 source

The baritone Leone Giraldoni, later one of Verdi's favourite singers, did both. He arrived from Madrid in December 1849, two years after his debut and six years before he first sang at La Scala, and came back for the 1875 to 1876 season, near the end of his career.1 source1 source

Porto did have one advantage. Lisbon audiences, Cymbron writes, despised anything that was not Italian or had not succeeded in Italy, and Portuguese composers found a warmer welcome up north. Francisco de Sá Noronha's Beatrice di Portogallo was sung at the São João in 1863, and Miguel Ângelo Pereira's Eurico was cheered there in 1874 after it had flopped in Lisbon.1 source1 source

The Real Teatro was still the pride of Porto society when it burned on the night of 11 to 12 April 1908. Only the outer walls were left standing. With the building went the theatre's archive, including Mazzoneschi's plans.3 sources3 sources

The royal arms from the old façade survive. Carved in granite in eight blocks, with the Portuguese shield under a closed crown, they are now in the collection of the Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis in Porto.1 source1 source

Porto decided to rebuild on the same spot. A public competition followed, launched in October 1908 according to the theatre's English history and in October 1909 according to its Portuguese one; the architectural historian Rui Ramos dates the winning design to 1909. The winner was José Marques da Silva, later called “Porto's last classical and first modern architect”.3 sources3 sources

Marques da Silva, born in 1869, had trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studio of Victor Laloux. Back home in 1896 he designed São Bento railway station, built between 1896 and 1911. He died in 1947.1 source1 source

His theatre echoed the lost building and drew on French models, with a carefully staged passage from the entrance through the foyers to the auditorium. Underneath it was new: he used concrete for the main structure and cement mortar for the façades.2 sources2 sources

As in 1798, Porto's own people paid, not the state. Tens of thousands of shares were issued at 20 escudos each. The work dragged on through the coups and riots of the First Republic (1910 to 1926), shortages of materials during the First World War and an epidemic of typhus. The new Teatro de São João opened on 7 March 1920.2 sources2 sources

The new theatre had a short life as a theatre. In 1932, twelve years after it opened and with Porto's stage in decline, it was renamed São João Cine and from then on showed mostly films. The building slowly ran down.2 sources2 sources

In February 1982 the building was listed as a property of public interest. Ten years later, on 8 October 1992, the Portuguese state bought it, and on 28 November 1992 it reopened as the Teatro Nacional São João (TNSJ), with Eduardo Paz Barroso as director. Between 1993 and 1995 it was restored and re-equipped to a project by the architect João Carreira, largely following the original specifications.3 sources3 sources

In December 1995 the director Ricardo Pais took charge and gave the house its own artistic programme, with new productions of Portuguese and foreign plays and festivals that brought directors such as Robert Wilson and Peter Stein to Porto. In 2003 the TNSJ took on a second stage, the Teatro Carlos Alberto, and in 2007 it became a state-owned company and was given the São Bento da Vitória monastery as a third venue.1 source1 source

The concrete later showed its age. In 2006 the joints of the structure began to expand and blocks of concrete fell from the façade, so the building was wrapped in safety netting and boarded up at street level. The exterior was restored between May 2013 and September 2014.1 source1 source

A decree of 10 July 2012 raised the building to the rank of national monument, together with Lisbon's Teatro Nacional D. Maria II. It called the theatre a notable example of the Beaux-Arts style and noted that it had become a reference point in the country's cultural life.1 source1 source

One of Portugal's national theatres stands where Porto's merchants built their playhouse in the 1790s. Pedro Sobrado, the TNSJ's chairman, said in 2020 that it is a national theatre “of” Porto rather than “in” Porto, because both the 1798 theatre and the 1920 one were paid for by the city's own people, not by the state.1 source1 source

The old theatre is also part of the city's map. Introducing a round table of historians on the Real Teatro, the TNSJ described it as a theatre that “civilised the city” and helped shape its plan. Apart from the twelve years after the fire, a theatre has stood on the south side of the Praça da Batalha since 1798.2 sources2 sources