Le siège de Corinthe
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Le siège de Corinthe (The Siege of Corinth) is an opera in three acts by Gioacchino Rossini to a French libretto by Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet, based on Maometto II by Cesare della Valle. First performance: Paris Opéra, Paris, 1826. Also known in its italian version, L'assedio di Corinto
The event the opera commemorates is the siege and ultimate destruction of the town of Messolonghi in 1822 by Turkish troops during the Greek War of Independence, fought from 1821 to 1829 (the reference to Corinth being an example of allegory; in an interesting coincidence, the town of Corinth, Mississippi was besieged four decades later during the American Civil War).
This same incident - condemned throughout Western Europe for its cruelty - also inspired a prominent painting by Eugène Delacroix, and was mentioned in the writings of Lord Byron and Victor Hugo.
The opera's overture has remained widely popular, and has been performed by many contemporary classical orchestras, including the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields when conducted by Neville Marriner.
The French version of this late Rossini opera was a partial rewrite of the composer's earlier Italian opera entitled Maometto II, but with exactly the same plot and characters, in the setting of the Turks' 1746 conquest of the Venetian colony Negroponte. That original version had premiered in Naples on December 3, 1820 -- two years before the Messolonghi siege and massacre. The 1820 opera was not well received, either in Naples or in Venice where Rossini tried out a somewhat revised version in 1823. But in 1826, two years after settling in Paris, Rossini tried yet again, with yet another version (including two, count 'em, two ballets as called for by French operatic tradition), transplanted to Greece with the new title Le siège de Corinthe in a topical nod to the then-raging Greek war for independence from the Ottomans, and of course translated into French. This time, Rossini succeeded, and the opera was performed in various countries over the next decade or so.
Unlike the overture, the opera itself has not remained "widely popular" or been performed by "many contemporary classical orchestras." After its initial popularity waned, it was pretty much ignored and then disappeared entirely from the repertoire until 1949, when a production was created in Florence (and repeated two years later in Rome) to showcase Renata Tebaldi. Twenty years after that, for the Rossini centennial, La Scala revived it with the young Beverly Sills and Marilyn Horne, in a performing edition by the conductor Thomas Schippers that interpolated arias from the original Neapolitan and Venetian versions and even from other obscure Rossini operas (as of course Rossini himself commonly did). According to the "New Yorker" magazine writer Joseph Wechsberg, that production also rates the distinction of having been the first at La Scala in which the conductor insisted on having a spotlight illuminating his head throughout the entire performance. In 1975, the Metropolitan Opera again revived it, under Schippers, for Beverly Sills' debut there.
Since 1975, the only production of the opera (in the US, at least) has been the October 2006 staging of the French version by the Baltimore Opera, in a mid-19th century re-translation back into Italian, with one aria interpolated from one of the predecessor "Maometto II" versions and one from Rossini's "Ciro in Babilonia," featuring Elizabeth Futral as Pamira and Viveca Geneaux as Neocle. The last performance was on October 22, 2006.
