Alzira: Tragedia lirica in Three Acts by Salvadore Cammarano

Alzira is the seventh work and the sixth opera to be published in the critical edition of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi. Composed during the middle of the very productive period of Verdi's first large-scale successes, Alzira premiered at Naples on August 12, 1845. Cammarano's libretto is based on a play of Voltaire, who used a real incident in sixteenth-century Peru during the Spanish conquest to shape a critique of the morality of the noble savage as against Christian values. The inherent co...