Aroldo is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on and adapted from their earlier 1850 collaboration, Stiffelio. The first performance was given in the Teatro Nuovo Comunale in Rimini on 16 August 1857.
Stiffelio had provoked the censorship board because of “the immoral and rough” storylines of a Protestant minister deceived by his wife and also because making the characters German did not ...
more
Aroldo is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on and adapted from their earlier 1850 collaboration, Stiffelio. The first performance was given in the Teatro Nuovo Comunale in Rimini on 16 August 1857.
Stiffelio had provoked the censorship board because of “the immoral and rough” storylines of a Protestant minister deceived by his wife and also because making the characters German did not please an Italian audience, although, as Budden notes, the opera "enjoyed a limited circulation (in Italy), but with the title changed to Guglielmo Wellingrode, the main protagonist now a German minister of state". Verdi had rejected an 1852 request to write a new last act for the Wellingrode version, but, by Spring 1856, in collaboration with his original librettist, Piave, he decided to rewrite the story line and make a small amount of musical changes and additions.
Drawing inspiration from novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Harold: the Last of...
less
