It is semi-privately managed by the heirs who have until recently administered it as if it were still the 1800s. The renowned opera house of Mantua, a private institution with public purpose, has managed through all those years of massive social change to remain untouched by one single element that is its box-holders never surrendered their boxes to the Municipality or the State. Since then, there have been many political and social changes for the city of Mantua, which has resulted in a noticeable transformation of just one province of a much larger foreign-domineering monarchy over the patriotic unification with other Italian lands to the democratic membership within the Republic of Italy. One such example notorious for remaining a class in itself is connected to the Mantua opera house called Teatro Sociale, which is privately owned by the heirs of the original box-holders who built the theatre in 1822, thus in a quite different Zeitgeist than today.
That it can play such a role successfully in an utterly specific and intricate manner, which today seems entirely anachronistic and obsolete, is rarer to find. That opera was and can still be a great source of social status, prestige, cultural and symbolic capital, is already quite well known. Fragments of texts in Croatian operas even parallel some of Verdi's. Productions of Ivan Zajc's or in the 1870s had the same impact on a Zagreb audience that, , or had on Italian ones. National feeling and allusive texts were, therefore, an integral part of almost all operas. However, subjects taken from national history still invited artists to join the struggle against foreign domination. The national language was no longer an exception in the theater, nor was the production of a domestic opera. Operas written in the second part of the century had different political connotations. The two operas created during the Movement (Vatroslav Lisinski's and ) were called upon to prove that the national language was suitable for opera and that the nation was able to produce complex musical works comparable to other nations. Music that grew out of the National Revival of the 1830s and 1840s was a constituent part of the movement, since its leaders assigned to music a role in the propagation of ideas. Croatian music culture in the 19th century directly expressed or indirectly reflected the political situation of the region.
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