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Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)

Un ballo in maschera

It was six years after the triumph of La traviata, before Giuseppe Verdi had another. The première of Un ballo in maschera (‘A Masked Ball’) in Rome was a success, despite the fact that it could not be performed as the composer had intended. Its original location was also changed. Censors had prevented the world première taking place in the new opera house in Naples. In the first version of the opera, Verdi and his librettist Antonio Somma drew on the successful play by Eugène Scribe about the attempted murder of King Gustavus of Sweden. (Daniel-François-Esprit Auber had earlier composed an opera on the same subject.)

Both play and opera were based on fact. At a court ball in Stockholm in 1792, Count Anckarström murdered the autocratic ruler in a very unheroic manner, by shooting him in the back with a pistol loaded with small shot and nails. A regicide on stage was something that the censors for the House of Bourbon, rulers of the Kingdom of Naples, were clearly never going to allow – especially not after the assassination attempt on French Emperor Napoleon III.

Verdi eventually agreed to move the action of the opera to another time and place. But he found the new, approved libretto very poor. The centerpiece of the opera, the masked ball, had been cut. Verdi was furious and withdrew the work, despite the Naples Opera threatening to prosecute him for breach of contract. Verdi had to concede to the censors in Rome, too: the action was transferred to 17^th century Boston.

Un ballo in maschera brings new psychological depth to the rich musical world of La traviata, Rigoletto and Il trovatore. Drama and music are more refined and more tightly integrated. The chorus numbers play a greater part in this opera than hitherto. Also new, after his elegant French opera style, are elements such as the page Oscar and the quartet by the gallows, where the conspirators’ mocking laughter rings out in staccato fashion. The rich orchestration, which never drowns the melodic line, heralds Verdi’s brilliant late opera style.