Ecco: respiro appena… Io son l'umile ancella (Adriana Lecouvreur)

Cilea's opera, to a libretto by Arturo Colautti after the 1849 play by Scribe and Legouvé, was first performed at the Teatro Lirico in Milan on 6 November 1902, with Enrico Caruso as Maurizio. Its heroine was a real actress of the Comédie-Française, and the opera lets her declaim Racine on stage. The fatal bouquet of poisoned violets has been dismissed as improbable since the beginning; the work survived anyway, carried by singers — Tebaldi's 1963 revival returned it to the Metropolitan after decades away. Cilea writes for the voice with a restraint unusual among his verismo contemporaries.