Scene and Duet of Amelia and Simone (Simon Boccanegra)

Simon Boccanegra failed at La Fenice on 12 March 1857; Verdi blamed the gloom of Piave's libretto, taken from a play by García Gutiérrez, and the audience's difficulty in following a plot about Genoese factional politics. Nearly a quarter of a century later Giulio Ricordi persuaded him to rebuild it with Arrigo Boito, and the revision reached La Scala on 24 March 1881. The council-chamber scene, written new for that version, is the first sustained evidence of what the Verdi–Boito partnership would later produce in Otello. Fiesco's Il lacerato spirito survives from the original score.