Bel raggio lusinghier (Semiramide)

Semiramide was the last opera Rossini wrote for an Italian theatre; it opened at La Fenice in Venice on 3 February 1823, after which he left for Vienna, London and finally Paris. Gaetano Rossi's libretto follows Voltaire's tragedy of the Babylonian queen who murdered her husband and is destroyed by her own son. Rossini wrote the title role for Isabella Colbran, whom he had married the previous year, and gave the work a scale — long ensembles, an unusually developed overture — that pushed against what Italian houses then expected. Its coloratura writing has kept it in circulation ever since.