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Concerts, music festivals, television series, professional wrestling matches—these are quite the undertakings. Luckily, there’s a word for the impressive individuals responsible for organizing and overseeing such productions: impresario. In the 1700s, English borrowed impresario directly from Italian, whose noun impresa means “undertaking.” (A close relative is the English word emprise, “an adventurous, daring, or chivalric enterprise,” which, like impresario, traces back to the Latin verb prehendere, meaning “to seize.”) At first English speakers used impresario as the Italians did, to refer to opera company managers, though today it is used much more broadly. It should be noted that, despite their apparent similarities, impress and impresario are not related. Impress is a descendant of the Latin verb pressare, a form of the word premere, meaning “to press.”
Examples of impresario in a Sentence
Stacy Perman, Los Angeles Times, 2 Apr. 2025
The Manner’s Sloane Bar set the stage for Marc Jacobs’ post-show extravaganza, with a fashionable melange of models fresh from the runway at the New York Public Library, drag queens, nightlife impresarios, and friends of the brands enjoying one of the bar’s specialty martinis in the moody space.
—Sam Falb, Vogue, 4 Feb. 2025
The outrageous plot follows failing impresario Max Bialystock who plans to stage a Broadway flop and collect on investors’ money.
—Caroline Frost, Deadline, 2 Mar. 2025
Desperate to stop their downward trajectory, the band hired future Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren to manage them.
—Daniel Kreps, Andy Greene
march 1, Rolling Stone, 1 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for impresario
Cite this Entry
“Impresario.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impresario. Accessed 22 Apr. 2025.
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impresario
noun
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