page_title: Simon Boccanegra
section_title: Composition history: the 1881 revision
hierarchical_section_title: Simon Boccanegra / Composition history: the 1881 revision
caption_attribution_description: English: Boccanegra-costume for 1881
context_page_description: Simon Boccanegra 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 by Antonio García Gutiérrez, whose play El trovador had been the basis for Verdi's 1853 opera, Il trovatore.
  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 aging composer on a project which eventually became a new opera, Otello, but to which Verdi had not totally committed at that time.
  The revised version of Simon Boccanegra, with the now-famous Council Chamber scene, was first performed at La Scala in Milan on 24 March 1881. It is this version which is the one most frequently performed today.
context_section_description: In 1868, Giulio Ricordi suggested the idea of revisions to Boccanegra; the idea was again broached ten years later, early in 1879, but was shrugged off by Verdi with a note saying that the 1857 score, which had been sent to the composer for review, would remain untouched "just as you sent it to me". Persisting with further attempts to convince the composer, Ricordi had also broached the idea of a collaboration with Arrigo Boito for a new opera based on Shakespeare's Othello. Musicologist Roger Parker speculates that Verdi's final agreement to revise Boccanegra was based on a desire to "test the possibility" of working with Boito before possibly embarking on the larger project.
  Once Verdi began to re-look at his earlier work, objections – and new ideas – began to emerge: "the score is not possible as it stands" and "I shall have to redo all the second act [1857: act 2, which became act 1 in the 1881 revision] and give it more contrast and variety, more life" are examples of his reasoning, which he laid out in a letter to Ricordi in November 1880.  His principal concern was how to make changes to the 1857, act 2. "I have said in general it needs something to give life and variety to the drama's excessive gloom", he writes and he continues by recalling:
  two magnificent letters of Petrarch's, one addressed to [the historical] Boccanegra, the other to the [then-]Doge of Venice, warning them not to start a fratricidal war, and reminding them that both were sons of the same mother, Italy, and so on.  This idea of an Italian fatherland at this time was quite sublime!
  In spite of the complexity of many of Boito's proposed ideas, along with his alternative scenarios, which are expressed in a long letter to Verdi (most of which the composer regarded as excessive), the Council Chamber scene emerged as the focus of the new collaboration. Although he had confidence in the young librettist's abilities ("[The scene] written by you could not possibly be dull"), Verdi did caution Boito that he appeared to be "aiming at a perfection impossible here.  I [Verdi] aim lower and am more optimistic than you and I don't despair", in essence, expressing an unwillingness to re-write the opera as completely as Boito had proposed. It would have been far more work than the composer wished to be involved in at the time.
  The pair spent the latter part of 1880 and into January 1881 with back-and-forth additions and revisions (the composer in Genoa, the librettist in Milan and meeting only once), all of which are heavily documented in the Verdi-Boito correspondence, the Carteggio Verdi-Boito, and significantly quoted in Budden.  All this was the build-up to performances in Milan the following March, although the composer was constantly concerned about the suitability of the singers engaged there for that season, and he threatened to withdraw the opera on more than one occasion.
  The result was the contrast, which Parker describes, between the original 1857 act 2 finale, "set in a large square in Genoa, [as] a conventional four-movement concertante finale, a grand ceremonial scene" whereas, in the 1881 revision, "[Verdi] injected into the heart of the work an episode of enormous vividness and power, enriching the character of Boccanegra in such a way that his subsequent death scene gains considerably in impressiveness". And, as Budden puts it, "Simone (sic) rises to spiritual greatness.  For the first time, his moral authority puts forth all its strength, ... positively as in the appeal for peace ..."
caption: Doge's costume for the 1881 revision
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