Certainly, the opera’s lyrical content resonated with those with ambitions for Italy’s reunification. Premiered on 17 March 1846 at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, much has been made of the possibility that Verdi had a political reason for writing Attila. And Zacharias Werner’s 1809 play, Attila, King of the Huns, was just the sort of material that he needed to compose great music. At the top of the list were Shakespeare’s King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest Kean, by Alexander Dumas pere Victor Hugo’s Marion Delorme, Ruy Blas, and Le Roi s’amuse (“The King’s Jester”) Lord George Gordon Byron’s Cain Jean Baptiste Racine’s Phedre Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s A secreto agravia secreta venganza Vicomte Francois Rene de Chateaubriand’s Atala and Count Vittorio Alfieri’s Filippo (which would eventually become the opera Don Carlo), among others.Giuseppe Verdi, it would seem, liked nothing better than a historical melodrama to inspire him to write opera. Verdi drew up a list of possible operatic texts, and even a partial reading of that list reveals an extraordinary collection of literary masterworks old and new.
Opera projects: lots and lots of possible future projects occupied the self-described “galley slave’s” attention. (For our information: Austria ruled Venice and its home province of Veneto until 1866 when, after the Third Italian War of Independence, the city and province were incorporated into the newly minted Kingdom of Italy.)īack in his hometown of Busseto, Verdi spent the last days of 1849 and the first weeks of 1850 considering new projects (and we’re not talking about his long-term girlfriend and future wife Giuseppina Strepponi’s “Honey Do” list: “Giuseppe, the Jacuzzi is on the fritz again!”). Specifically, this post will focus on how Verdi managed to get a highly charged political story past the Venetian/Austrian censors and into production. Today’s post will focus on yet another of Verdi’s Teatro la Fenice premieres, that of Rigoletto, which took place on March 11, 1851. Bob Prescribes post for May 11, 2021, focused on Verdi’s fifth opera, Ernani, which received its premiere at the Fenice on March 9, 1844. My Music History Monday post for March 6, 2017, focused on the 164th anniversary of the (disastrous) premiere of La Traviata, which took place at the Fenice on March 6, 1853. These operas are no strangers to this Patreon page. Yesterday’s Music History Monday post – entitled “The Phoenix Rises” was about Venice’s fabled opera house, the Teatro la Fenice, “The Phoenix Theater.” Among the many operatic premieres that the Fenice has seen on its boards are five – count ‘em, five – by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901): Ernani (1844) Attila (1846) Rigoletto (1851) La Traviata (1853) and Simon Boccanegra (1857).
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