The French version of this late Rossini opera was a partial rewrite of the composer's 1820 Italian opera, Maometto II, but with exactly the same story and characters, in the setting of the Turks' 1470 conquest of the Venetian colony of Negroponte. That original version had premiered in Naples on 3 December 1820 – six years before the Missolonghi siege and massacre. The original Maometto was not well received, neither in Naples nor in Venice where Rossini tried out a somewhat revised version in 1823, this time with a happy ending using music from his own La donna del lago at the conclusion. But in 1826, two years after settling in Paris, Rossini tried yet again, with yet another version, transplanted it to the Peloponnese with the new title Le siège de Corinthe in a topical nod to the then-raging Greek war for independence from the Ottomans, and translated it into French. This time, Rossini succeeded, and the opera was performed in various countries over the next decade or so.
Performance history
The first performance, in French, was at the Salle Le Peletier of the Paris Opéra on 9 October 1826. It was given as L'assedio di Corinto in Parma on 26 January 1828 and it reached Vienna in July 1831. In the United States, the first performance was given in French by the Italian Opera House in New York in February 1833 and in Italian in February 1835. The opera became popular across Europe in its Italian translation by Calisto Bassi with a contralto in the tenor role of Neocle, but from the 1860s it disappeared entirely from the repertory and was no longer staged for roughly the next eighty years. However, the opera's overture remained widely popular and never left the concert orchestra repertory. More recently the overture has been performed and recorded by several contemporary classical orchestras, including the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields conducted by Neville Marriner. In 1949 Le siège de Corinthe was finally revived again in a production starring Renata Tebaldi in Florence. That production was repeated two years later in Rome. In 1969 La Scala revived it for the Rossini centennial with the young Beverly Sills, in her La Scala debut, as Pamira, Marilyn Horne as Neocle, and Thomas Schippers conducting. The opera used a performing edition by noted musicologist and bel canto expert Randolph Mickelson that made use of insertion arias from the original Neapolitan and Venetian versions and even from other obscure Rossini operas. In 1975, the Metropolitan Opera used the La Scala version for its premiere of the opera. The Met production was conducted by Schippers again and starred Beverly Sills in her Met debut, now opposite Shirley Verrett, Justino Díaz and Harry Theyard. Since 1975, the only production of the opera in the US has been the October 2006 stagings of the French version by the Baltimore Opera, in a mid-19th century re-translation back into Italian, with one aria interpolated from one of the predecessor "Maometto II" versions and one from Rossini's Ciro in Babilonia which featured Elizabeth Futral as Pamira and Vivica Genaux as Neocle. Outside the US, the opera has been staged several times. It was produced in Florence in 1982 in Calisto Bassi's Italian version, starring Katia Ricciarelli and contralto Martine Dupuy, and under the direction of Pier Luigi Pizzi. In 1992 the same production was revived in Genoa starring Luciana Serra, but the original French version was chosen instead. The French version was also staged twice at the Rossini Opera Festival: in 2000 starring Michele Pertusi, Ruth Ann Swenson and Giuseppe Filianoti, and in 2017, following the new critical edition by Damien Colas, in a La Fura dels Baus production.
Roles
Synopsis
Act 1
Vestibule of the senate palace at Corinth
Act 2
Maometto's tent
Act 3
The tombs of Corinth, illuminated by a multitude of fires
