D'amor sull'ali rosee (Il Trovatore)

Verdi wrote Il trovatore while his librettist was dying: Salvadore Cammarano left the text unfinished in 1852 and the young Leone Emanuele Bardare completed it. The opera opened at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 19 January 1853 and spread across Europe faster than anything he had composed before. Its source, García Gutiérrez's play El trovador, supplies a plot of switched children and burnt mothers that has been ridiculed for a century and a half; the music answers with a directness that makes the argument beside the point. Leonora's scenes carry what the libretto declines to explain.