Il trovatore ('The Troubadour') is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto largely written by Salvadore Cammarano, based on the Spanish play El trovador (1836) by Antonio García Gutiérrez.

It was García Gutiérrez's most successful play, one which Verdi scholar Julian Budden describes as "a high flown, sprawling melodrama flamboyantly defiant of the Aristotelian unities, packed with all manner of fantastic and bizarre incident.

"[1] The premiere took place at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 19 January 1853, where it "began a victorious march throughout the operatic world",[2] a success due to Verdi's work over the previous three years.

There followed, slowly and with interruptions, the preparation of the libretto, first by Cammarano until his death in mid-1852 and then with the young librettist Leone Emanuele Bardare, which gave the composer the opportunity to propose significant revisions, which were accomplished under his direction.

For Verdi, the three years were filled with musical activity; work on this opera did not proceed while the composer wrote and premiered Rigoletto in Venice in March 1851.

In a letter around the time of his intended departure for France, he wrote encouragingly to Cammarano: "I beg you with all my soul to finish this Trovatore as quickly as you possibly can.

Including work on Trovatore, other projects consumed him, but a significant event occurred in February, when the couple attended a performance of The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils.

The composer learned that Cammarano had completed Manrico's third-act aria, "Di quella pira" just eight days before his death, but now he turned to De Sanctis to find him another librettist.

[17] First given in Paris in Italian on 23 December 1854 by the Théâtre-Italien at the Salle Ventadour,[18] the cast included Lodovico Graziani as Manrico and Adelaide Borghi-Mamo as Azucena.

The cast included Balbina Steffenone as Leonora, Pasquale Brignoli as Manrico, Felicita Vestvali as Azucena, and Alessandro Amodio as the Count di Luna.

[21] The work's UK premiere took place on 10 May 1855 at Covent Garden in London, with Jenny Bürde-Ney as Leonora, Enrico Tamberlik as Manrico, Pauline Viardot as Azucena and Francesco Graziani as the Conte di Luna.

A translation of Cammarano's libretto was made by librettist Émilien Pacini under the title of Le trouvère and it was first performed at La Monnaie in Brussels on 20 May 1856.

[18] For the French premiere, Verdi made some changes to the score of Le trouvère including the addition of music for the ballet in act 3 which followed the soldiers' chorus, where gypsies danced to entertain them.

[27] Several other revisions focused on Azucena's music, including an extended version of the finale of act 4, to accommodate the role's singer Adelaide Borghi-Mamo.

[28][29] In 1990 Tulsa Opera presented the first staging of Le trouvère in the United States using a new critical edition by musicologist, conductor, and Verdi scholar David Lawton.

[30] Recorded live for broadcast on NPR, Lawton conducted the premiere with Margaret Jane Wray as Leonore, Craig Sirianni as Manrique, Greer Grimsley as Le Comte de Luna, Barbara Conrad as Azucena, and the Tulsa Philharmonic.

When they have gone, Count di Luna enters, intending to pay court to Leonora himself, but hears the voice of his rival in the distance: (Deserto sulla terra / "Alone upon this earth").

Azucena, the daughter of the Gypsy woman burnt by the count, is still haunted by her duty to avenge her mother (Canzone: Stride la vampa / "The flames are roaring!").

Scene 2: In front of the convent Di Luna and his attendants intend to abduct Leonora and the Count sings of his love for her (Aria: Il balen del suo sorriso / "The light of her smile" ...

When she hears di Luna's name, Azucena's reactions arouse suspicion and Ferrando recognizes her as the supposed murderer of the count's brother.

When news of Azucena's capture reaches him, he summons his men and desperately prepares to attack (Cabaletta: Di quella pira l'orrendo foco / "The horrid flames of that pyre").

She promises to give herself to the Count, but secretly swallows poison from her ring in order to die before di Luna can possess her (Duet: Mira, d'acerbe lagrime / "See the bitter tears I shed").

However, musicologist Roger Parker notes that "the extreme formalism of the musical language has been seen as serving to concentrate and define the various stages of the drama, above all channeling them into those key confrontations that mark its inexorable progress".

He quotes from a letter which Verdi wrote to Marianna Barbieri-Nini, the soprano who was due to sing the Leonora in Venice after the premiere, and who expressed reservations about her music.

Scenes of comic chaos play out over a performance of Il trovatore in the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera (including a quotation, in the middle of the act 1 overture, of Take Me Out to the Ball Game).

As part of the compromise for withdrawing his own claim in favour of Ferdinand, Frederic was granted the County of Luna, one of the lesser titles that his father had held.

Thus, with his military success, Ferdinand's side has the upper hand in the war and is effectively the Royalist party, with the backing of much of the nobility and the Dowager Queen, and he also has Di Luna as his chief henchman (Luna's own connection to the royal family is not mentioned, being not necessary to the drama): while Urgel, losing the war and on the back foot, is forced to recruit among outlaws and the dispossessed, effectively taking the part of a rebel despite having some legal right to his case.

Thus the fact that the forces of Urgel, in the opera as in real life, lose every pitched battle: and on the single occasion that they capture a castle (named in the opera as "Castellor", a fairly generic name for a castle, there being many Castellars in the region), it proves a handicap to them because their only hope in battle lies in speed, mobility, surprise and ambush, all of which are lost when defending a fortress.

Thus it is that the fictitious troubadour Manrico can gain his rags-to-riches background, having risen from the obscurity of a Biscayan gypsy camp to become Urgel's chief general, a knight and a master swordsman in his own right, good enough to defeat Di Luna himself in a personal duel, or win a knightly tournament: only to lose it again on the military battlefield, where the odds are perpetually against him, and he is damned as an outlaw even before the opera begins, for no deed of his own but because his master is the rebel.

And yet he gets to be a heroic, popular outlaw, who might just escape with his life in return for a vow of future loyalty, if put on trial in front of the Prince himself: a chance that Luna does not want to risk, given that his rivalry with Manrico is personal as well as political.