page_title: Semiramide
section_title: 20th century and beyond
hierarchical_section_title: Semiramide / Performance history / 20th century and beyond
caption_attribution_description: Montserrat Caballé, (born in Barcelona, 1933) at Aix en Provence Festival in 1980&#160;: Sémiramide from Rossini.152573365
context_page_description: Semiramide is an opera in two acts by Gioachino Rossini.
  The libretto by Gaetano Rossi is based on Voltaire's tragedy Semiramis, which in turn was based on the legend of Semiramis of Assyria. The opera was first performed at La Fenice in Venice on 3 February 1823.
  Semiramide was Rossini's final Italian opera and according to Richard Osborne, "could well be dubbed Tancredi Revisited". As in Tancredi, Rossi's libretto was based on a Voltaire tragedy. The music took the form of a return to vocal traditions of Rossini's youth, and was a melodrama in which he "recreated the baroque tradition of decorative singing with unparalleled skill". The ensemble-scenes and choruses are of a high order, as is the orchestral writing, which makes full use of a large pit.
  After this splendid work, one of his finest in the genre, Rossini turned his back on Italy and moved to Paris. Apart from Il viaggio a Reims, which is still in Italian, his last operas were either original compositions in French or extensively reworked adaptations into French of earlier Italian operas.
context_section_description: It took until 1932 until the opera was again revived (in a German translation) in Rostock, and it then reappeared under Tullio Serafin at the 1940 at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.
  Presentations at La Scala in Milan in December 1962 with Joan Sutherland and Giulietta Simionato required the re-assembly of the entire score from the Rossini autograph, since no other texts were known to exist.
  Musicologist Philip Gossett noted that between 1962 and 1990 "some seventy opera houses have included the work in one or more seasons". A major revival at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 1980 featured Montserrat Caballé in the title role with Marilyn Horne as Arsace. It was not until the Met's 1990 revival after almost 100 years that a production based on a new critical edition was mounted. It alternated Lella Cuberli and June Anderson in the title role with Marilyn Horne again as Arsace. Among other performances, the work was given by the Rossini in Wildbad Festival in 2012, which was recorded with Alex Penda in the title role. In November 2017, the Royal Opera House, London, mounted its first production of the opera since the 1890s, with Joyce DiDonato in the title role.
caption: Montserrat Caballé in the title role (Aix-en-Provence Festival, 1980)
exif: {}