The Italian Girl in Algiers

Gioachino Rossini wrote the opera «L'italiana in Algeri» when he was 21 years old. He used a slightly altered libretto written by Angelo Anelli in 1808 for an opera of the same name by Luigi Mosca. It premiered in Venice at the Teatro San Benedetto on 22 May 1813. Rossini claimed to have written the opera in 18 days; his detractors said it took much longer — 27 days. In any case: phenomenal productivity combined with excellent quality.

In Russia the opera premiered on 15 April 1822 at the Aprakhsin Theatre on Znamenka (Moscow), in a production by Italian artists. The next time the complete opera was shown in Moscow was in June 2013 (that is, 190 years later!) at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre, again in Italian.

After staging the opera "The Enchanted Island," which consisted three-quarters of arias and dialogues, we wanted to stage something more collective. Rossini's "Italian Girl," richly seasoned with four- and seven-voice ensembles and choruses, was ideally suited to that purpose. In the course of the fight for operatic justice it was decided to take two of the heroine Isabella's countless arias away from her and to write arias to that music for two other female characters, Elvira and Zulma, who have no arias in the original.

Our artist Elena Litinskaya came up with, and we built, wonderful sets recreating the interior of an Arab palace. They turned out so well that after the performances we decided not to dismantle them, as we usually did in the very first week, but to live for two or three months like ordinary Arab sheikhs.

They say people liked the text of the opera. Here you can read it