Paris was the center of Western Culture in the 19th century. It was for this reason that Italian composers were eager to write new works for the city’s major theaters. Many of the important composers of that era were fluent in French making the task of writing a “French” opera relatively easy. Here are four operas by four Italian composers written for Paris.
Gaspare Spontini (1774-1851) composed La Vestale during his early years in Paris, setting a French libretto by Étienne de Jouy. This three-act tragédie lyrique brought together religious ritual, military spectacle, and a heroine torn between sacred duty and human love. Although Spontini had completed the score by the summer of 1805, opposition within the Paris Opéra delayed its production. The support of his patron, Empress Joséphine, helped overcome these obstacles.
The premiere took place on December 15, 1807, at the Paris Opéra, then housed in the Salle Montansier on the rue de Richelieu. Caroline Branchu sang Julia, the title character, opposite Étienne Lainez as the Roman general Licinius; Jean-Baptiste Rey conducted. The opera was an enormous success, establishing Spontini’s reputation and receiving more than two hundred performances in Paris by 1830.
Performances dwindled as the century advanced. Its last nineteenth-century appearances at the Paris Opéra were in 1854. A reasonable explanation is that its classical austerity and ceremonial pacing increasingly seemed remote beside the newer operas of Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner. By the century’s end, it was chiefly an admired historical masterpiece, occasionally revived, rather than a living staple of the theater. Its later rediscovery would depend heavily on exceptional sopranos, notably Rosa Ponselle and Maria Callas.
Recent staged performances of Spontini’s La Vestale were at Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna, Italy, on February 28 and March 2, 2025. Carmela Remigio sang Julia, Alessandro Benigni conducted, and Gianluca Falaschi directed. A forthcoming production opens at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden on September 26, 2026, starring Sonya Yoncheva and directed by Lydia Steier.
Dedicated to Joséphine, La Vestale suited the grandeur and Roman imagery of Napoleon’s Empire. Its triumphal processions and solemn ceremonies provided an imposing public setting for an intensely personal drama. The music preserves Gluck’s seriousness and dramatic concentration while expanding the expressive possibilities of the orchestra and the sustained lyrical line. Berlioz admired the score, which helped prepare the way for nineteenth-century French grand opera.
The story takes place in ancient Rome. Returning from a victorious campaign, Licinius discovers that his beloved Julia has become a Vestal Virgin, bound to chastity and charged with tending Vesta’s sacred fire. During his triumphal celebration, she must crown him with a wreath. He arranges to meet her secretly that night. When the lovers reunite in the temple, their absorption in one another allows the sacred flame to expire. Licinius escapes, but Julia refuses to identify him and is condemned to be buried alive.
Licinius’s pleas and confession fail to persuade the religious authorities to spare her. As the sentence is being carried out, a thunderstorm erupts. Lightning ignites Julia’s veil and rekindles the sacred fire. The priests recognize the miracle as Vesta’s forgiveness: Julia is rescued, released from her vows, and permitted to marry Licinius.
“O nume tutelar,” Julia’s prayer in Act II of La Vestale, known in the original French as “Ô des infortunés, déesse tutélaire”-“O guardian goddess of the unfortunate” is the opera’s best-known aria. After the sacred flame has gone out, Julia appeals to Latona for mercy. Rosa Ponselle gives a stuningly beautiful rendition of the aria
Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842) composed Médée in 1796-97, when he was already established in Paris. François-Benoît Hoffman supplied a French libretto drawing on the Medea legend, particularly its treatment by Euripides and Pierre Corneille. The three-act work belongs to the opéra-comique tradition because it combines musical numbers with spoken dialogue. Cherubini brought to this form the dramatic intensity associated with Gluck, supported by orchestral writing that gives extraordinary force to the heroine’s emotional upheavals.
The first performance took place at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris on March 13, 1797, with Julie-Angélique Scio as Médée and Pierre Gaveaux as Jason. It attracted a large audience and considerable enthusiasm for the music, acting, and spectacular scenery. Critics nevertheless objected to the first act’s length and the combination of spoken tragedy with opera; cuts began with the second performance. The work received 39 performances before disappearing from the Paris repertory in 1799.
Médée subsequently found a stronger foothold in German-speaking countries. In 1855, Franz Lachner replaced the spoken dialogue with recitatives. Carlo Zangarini’s Italian translation of this version reached La Scala in 1909. Maria Callas’s Florence revival in 1953 restored the opera to international attention and made Medea one of her defining roles. The Met performed the Italian version of the opera for the first time in 2022 with Sondra Radvanovsky in the title role.
The story unfolds in ancient Corinth. Médée has betrayed her family to help Jason obtain the Golden Fleece and has borne him two children. He now abandons her to marry Dircé-called Glauce in the Italian version-the daughter of King Créon. Médée’s appeals fail, and Créon orders her into exile. She obtains one final day in the city and uses the delay to prepare her revenge.
Pretending to accept the marriage, Médée sends Dircé poisoned wedding gifts. Her rival dies, but Médée seeks a still more terrible revenge. Torn between maternal love and hatred of Jason, she finally murders their children inside the temple. She confronts their father with her bloodstained dagger and vanishes as the temple is consumed by flames.
The opera’s central dramatic challenge is to make Médée’s suffering comprehensible while preserving the horror of what she does. Its greatest opportunities for a singing actress lie in the passage from wounded tenderness through humiliation and fury to an act that destroys her own happiness along with Jason’s.
In Médée’s Act I aria “Vous voyez de vos fils la mère infortunée,” better known in Italian as “Dei tuoi figli la madre,” she appeals to Jason as the mother of his children, reminding him of everything she has sacrificed for him and begging him to return. Maria Callas performed the role at La Scala in 1953 under Leonard Bernstein’s direction.
Completed in 1843, Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal By Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) was his last completed opera and one of his most ambitious undertakings. Written in French for the Paris Opéra, it combines Italian lyricism with the elaborate machinery of French grand opera: five acts, ballet, massed choruses, and spectacular historical scenes. With a libretto by Eugène Scribe, premiered at the Paris Opéra on November 13, 1843. After this opera tertiary syphilis gradually destroyed his body and mind.
The story begins in Lisbon, where Sébastien saves Zayda, a Muslim captive, from execution by the Inquisition before departing on his African campaign. She falls in love with him. After the Portuguese army is defeated, she finds the wounded king and saves his life by promising to marry the victorious commander, Abayaldos. Sébastien remains alone on the battlefield, where he sings the opera’s celebrated tenor romance, “Seul sur la terre.” The British-American Alfred Piccaver sings the aria in its Italian version.
Les vêpres siciliennes (The Sicilian Vespers) is a grand opera in five acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to a libretto by Eugène Scribe and Charles Duveyrier. Verdi’s main reason for writing the opera was to achieve a major original success at the Paris Opéra, which offered international prestige and artistic opportunities beyond those available in Italy. It is now most often performed in its Italian version I vespri siciliani, that is when it’s performed at all.
The work is the orphan of Verdi’s mature works. Why it is so infrequently staged is a mystery as the opera is a masterpiece. Berlioz, as fine a music critic as he was a composer, said “Verdi has risen very high in this new work.” He praised its melodic intensity, spacious ensembles, orchestral color, and its skillful orchestral restraint. He also admired Verdi’s passionate power that unfolds gradually. His admiration encompasses the music’s control and breadth as well as its emotional force. Yet the opera remins at the frontier of the standard operatic repertory.
The opera requires a first rate soprano, tenor, baritone, and bass. It is full of great arias and ensembles. It has perhaps the finest tenor-baritone duet the composer ever wrote – Quando al mio. The singers are Plácido Domingo and Sherrill Milnes. The duet has appeared here before, but it is so good that it deserves a reprise.
“Monforte [baritone] reveals to Arrigo [tenor] that he is his son. Arrigo is torn three ways. First, he fears he will lose Elena [his fiancée] because he promised her he would kill Monforte who now turns out to be his father. Then he doesn’t know how to treat his newfound father. And finally, he recalls how badly his mother was treated by his father. At the end of this duet, he’s an emotional chimera. The skill with which Verdi handles this situation is Olympian. The main theme first sung by the baritone and later by the tenor is part of the overture, which incidentally is probably the finest Verdi ever wrote. Equally impressive is the dramatic tension that builds throughout the duet. Verdi was the master of the tenor-baritone duet and even by his lofty standard, this number stands alone. A work of genius.” This quotation is taken from my review of the complete opera as performed by the Teatro Regio di Parma.
Why are many French operas by Italian composers performed in an Italian translation? I think Italian composers subconsciously write as if the text were in Italian such that the stresses and accents work better in Italian than they do in French. The music just sounds better in Italian. A composer can set French words consciously while still imagining melody through habits formed in Italian. The instinct for where a phrase should expand, where its emotional weight should fall, and how a sustained vowel should carry it need not change completely with the language of the libretto.
Italian’s clear vowels, frequent vowel endings, and strongly marked word stresses can give a lyrical phrase a particularly satisfying shape. An Italian translation may therefore bring out something already implicit in the music-even when the notes were originally composed to French words. The original language has historical authority; it does not automatically have the greatest expressive effect for every listener. Preferring Don Carlo or La Vestale in Italian need not be merely a matter of familiarity.
