Simon Boccanegra
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Key facts
- Librettist
- Francesco Maria Piave (first version) Arrigo Boito (second version)
- Language
- Italian
- Based on
- Antonio García Gutiérrez 's Simón Bocanegra (1843)
- Premiere
- 12 March 1857 ( 1857-03-12 ) (first version) 24 March 1881 ( 1881-03-24 ) (second version) , La Fenice , Venice (first version) La Scala , Milan (second version)
via Wikipedia infobox
~25 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Simon Boccanegra ( Italian: [siˈmom ˌbokkaˈneːɡra]) is an opera with a prologue and three acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on the play Simón Bocanegra (1843) by Antonio García Gutiérrez.
Simon Boccanegra was first performed at Teatro La Fenice in Venice on 12 March 1857. Given the complications of the original plot and the generally poor popular response – although the critical one was more encouraging – the opera dropped out of favour after 1866. Finally, 23 years later, Verdi's publisher persuaded the composer to revise the opera, with text changes to be prepared by Arrigo Boito, the librettist who aspired to work with the ageing composer on a project which eventually became a new opera, Otello, but to whom Verdi had not totally committed at that time.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Simon Boccanegra” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.