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Simon Boccanegra

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opera by Giuseppe Verdi

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

Wikidata facts

Genre
opera
Country of origin
Italy
Librettist
Arrigo Boito
Image
Disegno per copertina di libretto, disegno di Peter Hoffer per Simon Boccanegra (1955) - Archivio Storico Ricordi ICON012429.jpg
Show 9 more facts
location of first performance
Teatro La Fenice
date of first performance
1857-03-12
Commons category
Simon Boccanegra (Verdi)
title
Simon Boccanegra
number of parts of this work
3
language of work or name
Italian
publication date
1850-00-00
copyright status
public domain
form of creative work
opera
Sources (1)

via Wikidata · CC0

~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.