Stiffelio

Stiffelio put a Protestant minister with an adulterous wife on an Italian stage in 1850, and the censors of Trieste dismantled it before the premiere on 16 November: the clergyman became a sectarian, the closing scene of forgiveness read from the Gospel was cut. Verdi never saw it performed as written. He salvaged much of the music in Aroldo in 1857, transplanting the story to the Crusades, and the original was believed lost until copies of the autograph surfaced in the 1960s. Modern revivals date from the 1990s.