Dr Vicki Ann Cremona’s talk on the Royal Opera House

On the 3^rd February 2026, Professor Vicki Ann Cremona and Photographer Daniel Cilia delivered a very interesting talk at the Royal Malta Yacht Club to Rotary La Valette members and friends on their recent publication on The Royal Malta Opera House. The talk was accompanied by slides taken by Daniel Cilia. Daniel has a long history of helping the La Valette club produce its annual calendar with photos he donates.

Dr Vicki Ann Cremona’s spoke on the Royal Opera House in Valletta and in her style, typically weaved together architecture, cultural identity, political power, and the evolving meaning of public space in Malta. Drawing on her extensive research—culminating in the two-volume publication The Malta Royal Opera House – Power, Culture and the Stage—she situated the building not merely as a lost landmark, but as a prism through which Malta’s cultural and political history can be understood.

A central theme in her work is the Opera House as a symbol of Malta’s aspirations and tensions during the British colonial period. She highlighted how its original 19th-century design by Edward Middleton Barry represented a deliberate architectural statement: a grand neoclassical structure that projected cultural sophistication and imperial presence. The building’s prominence in Valletta’s urban fabric made it a stage not only for artistic performance but also for the negotiation of identity between coloniser and colonised.

Cremona also emphasised the Opera House as a site of collective memory. Its destruction during World War II transformed it into a cultural wound—an absence that continues to shape Maltese identity. She discussed how the ruins became a contested space, with decades of debate over whether to rebuild, restore, or reinvent the site. These debates, she argued, reveal deeper questions about heritage, modernity, and national self-definition.

Another interesting topic was scenography and performance culture. As a theatre historian, Cremona explored how the Opera House functioned as a hub for artistic exchange, hosting international productions that connected Malta to broader European cultural currents. She situated the Opera House within Malta’s wider performance history, linking it to themes she has explored in her research on theatre architecture, costume, and spectacle.

Finally, she addressed the site’s contemporary transformation, particularly Renzo Piano’s redesign into an open-air theatre. She examined how this intervention reflects shifting attitudes toward heritage: embracing the ruin rather than erasing it, and creating a hybrid space that acknowledges loss while enabling new forms of cultural expression.

Dr. Cremona’s overarching message is that the Royal Opera House is not simply a building, but a cultural narrative—one that continues to evolve as Malta negotiates its past, present, and future.

After the talk, the Club President, Profs. Clare Vassallo presented Daniel Cilia with a Paul Harris Award for his long and outstanding voluntary support of Rotary Club la Valette. Daniel’s photopgraphs have adorned the annual fund-raising calender for the Clubs India Project for year.