Read on to discover all about the troubled beginnings of Verdi's violent and insurgent opera, Un ballo in maschera...
A short-lived Shakespearean project
In the early months of 1857, Verdi had Shakespeare on his mind, and specifically King Lear. For some years, he had considered writing an opera based on the tragedy, and now he finally seemed close to doing it. A contract had been signed with the Teatro di San Carlo, Naples, and Re Lear was scheduled for the 1858 season. But finding the right cast of singers proved impossible, and the project ran frustratingly into the buffers.
Un ballo in maschera... a dark and violent libretto with a love triangle at its heart
Gruff and disappointed, Verdi was forced to ‘scrounge around’ for another subject. What he found was Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué (‘Gustav III, or The Masked Ball’), a libretto by Eugène Scribe which the French composer Daniel Auber had set successfully 24 years earlier. Scribe’s partly fictionalised libretto was based on a real event – the shooting of Gustav III, King of Sweden, during a masked ball at the Royal Opera House, Stockholm in March 1792, and his death 13 days later.
Verdi was immediately attracted to the dramatic possibilities of the libretto, with its dark aura of violent political intrigue and a love triangle of Scribe’s own invention. Finding the scenario ‘grand, vast and beautiful’, he commissioned a leaner, scaled-down version of the libretto for an opera he tentatively titled Gustavo III di Svezia. This was submitted to the Neapolitan censors, who monitored the content of plays and operas in the politically turbulent Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Trouble with the censors... anti-royalist feeling and explicit violence
From the outset, there were problems with Verdi’s proposed subject. King Gustav must be made into a duke, the censors insisted, as his assassination might stir up anti-royalist feeling. The plot should be pushed much further back in time, to dilute parallels with the present. And no firearms could be used on stage: that would be too explicitly violent. Verdi had little choice but to bow to the censors’ wishes. By Christmas 1857, he had shifted the action to Pomerania, changed the murder weapon from a pistol to a dagger, and given the opera a new, non-royal title: Una vendetta in domino.
By New Year, the revisions were done, and Verdi travelled to Naples expecting rehearsals to begin. They never did. Perhaps spooked by the attempted assassination of Emperor Napoleon III on 14 January in Paris, the Neapolitan censors fell into further paroxysms over Una vendetta’s still worrisomely insurgent tendencies. More changes to the libretto were demanded, and another new title suggested: Adelia degli Adimari.
Un ballo in maschera... I'll see you in court!
By now, though, Verdi had had enough of what he ruefully called his ‘sea of troubles’, and refused all further alterations. The theatre sued him for breach of contract, and he sued back, at one point producing a 90-page document in his defence.
An out-of-court settlement was eventually reached, and Verdi took Una vendetta in domino to Rome, where he was hoping for a trouble-free premiere production. New censors, however, awaited, and Verdi was once more forced to shift the action, this time to 17th-century Boston, Massachusetts. The work now, though, had its definitive title, Un ballo in maschera (‘A Masked Ball’), and finally reached the stage at the Teatro Apollo on 17 February, 1859.
Un ballo in maschera... finally a hit!
All the trouble, it seemed, had ultimately been worth it, as the audience reacted ecstatically. The composer took over 20 curtain calls on opening night, and the run sold out, with tickets hawking at inflated prices on the black market. Un ballo in maschera had been a problem child, but even Verdi, a man of notoriously exacting standards, was happy to acknowledge that it eventually turned out ‘magnificently’.