Il trovatore

Verdi worked on Il trovatore while his mother was dying and while his librettist Salvadore Cammarano died with the text unfinished; Leone Emanuele Bardare completed it. The source is a Spanish play by Antonio García Gutiérrez, whose plot of a stolen child and a Gypsy's revenge Verdi refused to simplify, telling his collaborators that the stranger it was, the better. The premiere at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 19 January 1853 was an immediate success, and within three years the opera was being staged across Europe and the Americas.