The Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci taught that for the revolution to succeed it should conquer the means of thought first rather than the means of production. Only if the dominant bourgeois culture is replaced by a communist counter culture will the working class come round to seeing the revolution as the commonsense thing to do.

The appointment of a woman to lead such a prestigious institution should have been cause for rejoicing, especially for the left. Instead it has provoked an outbreak of operatic sound and fury

In Italy, as everywhere in the West, the left has been remarkably successful in achieving what Gramsci, a co-founder of the Italian communist party in 1921, called cultural hegemony. The Venice opera house – La Fenice – is the scene of one battle among many being fought by Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government to try and reverse the capture of the citadels of Italian culture by the ‘comunisti al caviale’ (caviar communists).

Last September, the foundation that manages the state-owned opera house, currently under right-wing control, appointed the young conductor Beatrice Venezi as its new musical director on a four-year contract to start next October.

The appointment of a woman to lead such a prestigious institution should have been cause for rejoicing, especially for the left. Instead it has provoked an outbreak of operatic sound and fury like that in Federico Fellini’s 1978 film Prova d’Orchestra which sees members of an orchestra refuse to obey their conductor in the name of the revolution and as a result everything ends up being reduced to rubble.

Venezi, who is only 35, makes no secret of her solid right-wing views and prior to this appointment had since 2022 been music adviser to Meloni’s culture minister. Meloni herself has described Venezi as ‘a talented and courageous artist who refuses to bow to the dictatorship of thought and language.’

Naturally, the left are up in arms and arrabbiate come dei puma (furious like pumas). Though few believe them, the trade unions, the chorus and the orchestra at La Fenice claim this has nothing to do with Venezi’s politics. Indeed, they find such an accusation, they have written, ‘offensive’.

Instead, they insist that Venezi is totally unqualified for the post because her curriculum vitae is ‘not minimally comparable with that of the great conductors.’

In vain, do Venezi’s defenders point out that she has conducted 160 symphonies and 50 operas. Or that the professor who taught her conducting at the Milan Conservatory said on television she was ‘molto brava’ and got an almost unheard of maximum marks in the exams at the end of the course. Or indeed that she is one of only a handful of top female conductors in the entire world.

Last year, she was principal guest conductor at the equally grand Teatro Colòn in Buenos Aires. In January she was back in Italy to conduct Bizet’s Carmen in Pisa which earned her a ten minute standing ovation and Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall Stadt Mahagonny in Trieste an eight minute one.

Yet the orchestra at La Fenice has already gone on strike for a week in protest and threaten to do so again unless her appointment is rescinded. And if she should dare to take up her post, the orchestra promises they will refuse to work with her.

Meanwhile they have produced yellow protest lapel badges which they are dishing out to audiences and wearing during performances.

As for Venezi, she has said that La Fenice is ‘mostly in the hands of the unions’ with the situation there ‘totally anarchical’. People abroad ask her, she says, how this is possible in a taxpayer funded organisation.

Italy’s most famous conductor, Riccardo Muti, has always studiously avoided talking about politics but even he felt compelled to leap to her defence: ‘I’ve never seen her conduct, so I can’t comment, and even if I had, I wouldn’t comment because I’d find it unpleasant. I read a lot in the newspapers. Let her conduct, and then the various orchestras and choirs will decide.’

Arrigo Cipriani, the 93-year-old owner of the legendary Harry’s Bar and noble conscience of the city nicknamed La Serenissima, blames sexism.

‘What is the truth?… It is that Beatrice Venezi is a woman. That’s why they won’t let her work,’ he told Il Foglio. That and female jealousy. ‘She’ll have made the wife of some member of the orchestra jealous… It’s always the same old story.’

The opposition to her is not driven by politics and sexism alone, her defenders claim, but also by snobbery. Venezi is both very young to be a conductor and very glamorous and has a populist touch. She has done – God forbid – a shampoo advertisement on the telly in which she proclaims ‘La ricerca dell’eccellenza è continua’ (The search for excellence is continuous).

Worse, in 2021 she did an evening conducting the orchestra at San Remo – Italy’s annual week-long pop music talent competition at which the nation’s pop culture is paraded in all its glory – which attracts a massive 60 per cent TV audience share each night. And she caused a stir at San Remo when she refused live on air to be addressed as the orchestra’s ‘direttrice’, the female form of the word ‘director’, as required by the woke diktat. To do so in her opinion, she explained, perpetuates sexual inequality and she demanded instead that the male form ‘direttore’ be used. She also insists she is called ‘maestro’ not ‘maestra’.

Last October, nearly 150 season ticket holders at La Felice signed a letter to the foundation in which they threatened to cancel their subscriptions if Venezi was allowed to take up her post. But as she told the Argentinian daily newspaper Clarìn, in a rare public comment, La Fenice risked being reduced to a museum: ‘Venice needs to attract new audiences who come with tourism. The current subscribers are over 80 years old.’

Like Meloni, Venezi is a conservative who gets called a fascist, especially because her father Gabriele, an estate agent, was a regional leader of the tiny post-fascist party Forza Nuova which has so few supporters it was unable to field a single candidate at the last general election in 2022. He stood for mayor in their native city of Lucca in Tuscany in 2007 and got just 278 votes. That she believes in God and goes to mass does not help either.

When she conducted on New Year’s Eve 2023 at the Nice opera house left-wing activists displayed a huge white banner high up in the stalls above the stage just before the concert began which proclaimed in black and red: ‘Niente fascisti all’opera! Niente opera per I fascisti!’ (No fascists at the opera! No opera for fascists!).

They also shouted similar slogans but were whistled and jeered by most of the audience in defence. Venezi bowed to them then began the concert. Before the concert local activists had unsuccessfully urged the mayor to cancel Venezi saying Nice should not ‘give a blank cheque to Italian neofascism’.

But as Venezi told the daily newspaper La Sicilia last September: ‘I am the true democrat. I am the resistance to this type of one-thought-only dictatorship.’ Viva la Venezi!