Discover this rare Verdian jewel! Aroldo—one of the composer’s least performed works—premiered in 1857 in Rimini, Italy. The work was created in response to the censorship of Verdi’s 1849 Stiffelio, whose tale of a protestant pastor publicly pardonning an adulterer and his wife proved too scandalous for 19th-century Italian society. In creating Aroldo, Verdi’s librettist and collaborator Francesco Maria Piave transposed Stiffelio’s story and characters to the more distant setting of Great Britain at time of the Crusades, and the composer took advantage of this new version to add a fourth act to the opera, and to rewrite part of the first act as well as a few arias.
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