However, William Ashbrook notes that "Rosine Stoltz, the director's mistress, disliked her intended role of Hélène and Donizetti put the work aside when it was half completed".

[1] Donizetti then abandoned the score in favour of continuing to work simultaneously on both L'ange de Nisida and L'elisir d'amore,[1] and thus it was nearly 34 years after the composer's death that it was completed by his former pupil Matteo Salvi and received its first performance in an Italian translation and under its Italian title Il duca d'Alba at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 22 March 1882 with Leone Giraldoni in the title role, Abigaille Bruschi Chiatti as Amelia di Egmont, and Julián Gayarre as Marcello.

[6][7] It used the critical edition prepared by musicologist Roger Parker who has written extensive notes on the evolution of this original version.

Italian version The opera has only been rarely performed since 1882[10] and "no one seems even to have remembered its existence, until, that is, Fernando Previtali discovered the battered full-score used by the conductor at that momentous prima on a market stall in Rome [on 12 January 1952]".

[11]However, there was a major revival of the Italian version at the 1959 Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, after conductor Thomas Schippers rediscovered the score [12] (originally found in 1952), reworked it by removing most of Salvi's additions and reconstructing the final acts himself from Donizetti's notes.

All the same, Weatherson has also stated: At the Teatro Nuovo of Spoleto on 11 June 1959 was staged a further purported revival of the Donizetti/Salvi opera, again in three acts, the orchestra reduced throughout to "Donizettian" sound-bites (as though the Paris Opéra of his day would have been deficient in instrumentation), with preludes and recitatives dropped....and pared-down codas.

Schippers presented the United States premiere of the work later that year under the umbrella of the American Opera Society at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia on 15 October 1959.

Other stagings included that at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels in 1979 (using sets inspired by Carlo Ferrario's 1882 designs),[11] the run of six performances at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples, in December 1979 and January 1980,[13] and, in October 1982, Opera Orchestra of New York conducted by Eve Queler gave a concert performance of a version of the opera with Matteo Manuguerra in the title role.

[11] When the Schippers version with the Visconti production was revived at the Teatro Nuovo in Spoleto (Festival dei Due Mondi) on 1 July 1992 "...there was a further attempt...this time under the baton of Alberto Maria Giuri [and] when the Donizetti/Salvi Il duca d'Alba finally made an appearance in an edition at last musically worthy of its original dimensions and dramatic character, far more complete now, the Duca d'Alba sung by Alan Titus, Marcello by César Hernàndez, Amelia by Michaela Sburiati, Sandoval by Marco Pauluzzo and Carlo by Dennis Petersen.

"It was conducted by Enrique Mazzola; with Inva Mula (Amelia), Franck Ferrari (Duca), Arturo Chacón-Cruz (Marcello), Francesco Ellero d'Artegna (Sandoval) and Mauro Corna (Daniele) with the Orchestre National de Montpellier.