Opera house as wealthy patrons and it continues to have a large number of working opera houses such as Teatro Massimo in Palermo (the biggest in Italy), Teatro di San Carlo in Naples (the world's oldest working opera house) and Teatro La Scala in Milan. In contrast, there was no opera house in London when Henry Purcell was composing and the first opera house in Germany was built in Hamburg in 1678. In the 17th and 18th centuries, opera houses were often financed by rulers, nobles, and wealthy people who used patronage of the arts to endorse their political ambition and social
The Royal Opera directors since its inception: Karl Rankl, Rafael Kubelík, Georg Solti, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink and Antonio Pappano. From the mid-19th century, opera had been presented on the site of Covent Garden's Royal Opera House, at first by Michael Costa's Royal Italian Opera company. After a fire, the new building opened in 1858 with The Royal English Opera company, which moved there from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. From the 1860s until the Second World War, various syndicates or individual impresarios presented short seasons of opera at the Royal Opera House (so named in 1892), sung in the original language, with