In 1857, Verdi was called on to write an opera for the San Carlo Theatre in Naples, and he immediately began his search for the perfect story. His initial idea was King Lear by Shakespeare, but the lack of time available forced him to fall back on a libretto by Scribe, Gustave III ou Le bal masqué, which had already been set to music by Auber and by Mercadante. The story was inspired by actual events from 1792; the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden by one of his officers during a ball. The subject was undoubtedly controversial, the on-stage murder of a monarch would not pass unnoticed by the Neapolitan censors, who in fact imposed numerous cuts and modifications. But the writer was too fond of the 18th-century traits and the lively French-influenced style of his new opera to be able to accept, among the many requests, the moving of the action to the 12th century, where it would have been impossible “to find a princeling, a duke, a devil, even from the North, who had seen a little of the world and experienced the atmosphere of Louis XIV”. With its Neapolitan debut thus grounded, Un ballo in maschera was staged at the Apollo Theatre in Rome, where it was performed on 17 February 1859.

Un ballo in maschera

Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Theatre

EPSG:4326

La traviata

Teatro La Fenice

The staging of Tosca, Puccini's masterpiece, by Massimo Popolizio and conducted by Michele Gamba, returns to the Maggio. On January 14, 1900 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, Tosca made its debut, an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. The source is Victorien Sardou's historical drama La Tosca, written in 1887 specifically for actress Sarah Bernhardt. Puccini was inflamed for that subject after attending a theatrical performance and did everything he could to turn it into an opera. However, the Ricordi publisher initially entrusted the project to another composer, Alberto Franchetti, only to then put it back in the hands of Puccini in 1895. To make Tosca's libretto, the Illica-Giacosa tandem, already successfully tested in La bohème, was reconfirmed. But the work proceeds slowly and with numerous complaints from the librettists. Both consider Sardou's drama unsuitable for operatic transposition due to too many events that prevail over poetry. Puccini, on the other hand, for his part does not care and following only his musical intuition in 1899 he signs what will soon become another of his great masterpieces. Tosca is therefore a work of action where the tension never relaxes and in which the musical discourse must necessarily proceed without stopping, with rare exceptions. This leads the composer from Lucca to adopt a narrative technique based on a dense network of short and recurring motifs - often combined with each other - to comment on the frenetic unfolding of the story. The action is set in papal Rome at the time of the battle of Marengo. The protagonists Floria Tosca, passionate and strong-willed prima donna squared, and her lover Mario Cavaradossi, a painter with liberal and convinced anticlerical sympathies, are hindered by Baron Scarpia, chief of the Bourbon police at the service of the papacy. Animated by murky passions and innate evil, the baron, like a sadistic puppeteer, determines the course of events from start to finish. Fierce persecutor of Mario first, and of Tosca then, (until he is murdered by the woman after an attempted violence) Scarpia continues to hover like a ghost in the orchestra even when dead with the repetition of his threatening theme built on the tritone, the sinister interval that has been associated with Evil in music for centuries. But the dramatic atmosphere of the story, which includes three violent deaths on stage (a stabbing, a shooting and a suicide), is further accentuated by Puccini also through an orchestral writing full of dissonances and tensions, which anticipate the expressionist aesthetics, and a voice often exasperated and pushed to the limit.

Tosca

Composed in the autumn of 1833, Lucrezia Borgia debuted at the Teatro alla Scala on 26 December of the same year. The source is the homonymous drama by Victor Hugo that Felice Romani, author of the libretto, arranged in a prologue and two acts. It was Donizetti himself who suggested to Romani that he make an opera libretto from Hugo's drama, attracted as much by the high-tension situations present in the text as by the dark atmospheres that surround the story.

Lucrezia Borgia

Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte from the drama El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra by Tirso de Molina, through the libretto Don Giovanni o sia Il convitato di pietra by Giovanni Bertati for Giuseppe Gazzaniga.

Mattia Denti

Events

Past events

12 - 24 May, 2026

Un ballo in maschera · Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

8 - 17 Feb, 2026

La traviata · Teatro La Fenice

Future and recently performed repertoire

Il dottor Grenvil in La traviata by Verdi

Teatro La Fenice

Gubetta in Lucrezia Borgia by Donizetti

Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Samuel in Un ballo in maschera by Verdi

Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Cesare Angelotti in Tosca by Puccini

Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Il Commendatore in Don Giovanni by Mozart

Opera Carlo Felice Genova

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