Tu puniscimi, oh Signor (Luisa Miller)

Luisa Miller was written for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, where it opened on 8 December 1849 after Verdi had spent weeks quarrelling with the management and threatening to leave the city altogether. Cammarano's libretto reduces Schiller's Kabale und Liebe to a domestic tragedy, dropping most of its political attack and keeping the forged letter that destroys two lovers. The score marks a turn away from the choral manner of the 1840s toward a chamber-scaled drama of fathers and children. Quando le sere al placido is where that new intimacy becomes unmistakable.