Orchestra and Chorus, Fondazione Arturo Toscanini/Stefano Ranzani
Pier Luigi Pizzi, director, set and costume designer

Recording at Teatro Verdi, Busseto (Parma), February 2003

NTSC All Region; LPCM 2.0; Dolby Digital 5.1; Color; 16/9; 143 mins. Subtitled in Italian, English, German & French

Les Vêpres siciliennes, a five-act opera on a libretto by Auguste Scribe and Charles Duveyrier with music by Giuseppe Verdi, was first staged at the Paris Opéra on 13th June 1855. The subject of the opera was nothing other than an adaptation of a libretto that Scribe had written some years before, initially offered to Fromental Halévy and then to Gaetano Donizetti, who left it unfinished because of the onset of the illness that was to bring his life to an end. In the new version for Verdi, Scribe and Duveyrier transferred the action from sixteenth-century Flanders to thirteenth-century Sicily. At first the opera was greeted with great success.