Le siège de Corinthe (English: The Siege of Corinth) is an opera in three acts by Gioachino Rossini set to a French libretto by Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet, which was based on the reworking of some of the music from the composer's 1820 opera for Naples, Maometto II, the libretto of which was written by Cesare della Valle.

The opera commemorates the siege and ultimate destruction of the town of Missolonghi in 1826 by Turkish troops during the ongoing Greek War of Independence (1821–1829).

The same incident – condemned throughout Western Europe for its cruelty – also inspired a prominent painting by Eugène Delacroix (Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi), and was mentioned in the writings of Victor Hugo.

That work was deemed lost or mistitled until 1976 when the introduction was discovered by Nancy B. Reich at Manhattanville College's library.

The original Maometto was not well received, neither in Naples nor in Venice where Rossini tried out a somewhat revised version in 1823, this time with a happy ending using music from his own La donna del lago at the conclusion.

But in 1826, two years after settling in Paris, Rossini tried yet again, with yet another version (which included two ballets, as called for by French operatic tradition), transplanted it to the Peloponnese with the new title Le siège de Corinthe in a topical nod to the then-raging Greek war for independence from the Ottomans, and translated it into French.

It was given as L'assedio di Corinto (translated by Calisto Bassi[2]) in Parma on 26 January 1828 and it reached Vienna in July 1831.

[4] The opera became popular across Europe in its Italian translation by Calisto Bassi with a contralto in the tenor role of Neocle, but from the 1860s it disappeared entirely from the repertory and was no longer staged for roughly the next eighty years.

More recently the overture has been performed and recorded by several contemporary classical orchestras, including the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields conducted by Neville Marriner.

In 1949 Le siège de Corinthe was finally revived again in a production starring Renata Tebaldi in Florence.

Since 1975, the only production of the opera in the US has been the October 2006 stagings of the French version by the Baltimore Opera, in a mid-19th century re-translation back into Italian, with one aria interpolated from one of the predecessor "Maometto II" versions and one from Rossini's Ciro in Babilonia which featured Elizabeth Futral as Pamira and Vivica Genaux as Neocle.

It was produced in Florence in 1982 in Calisto Bassi's Italian version, starring Katia Ricciarelli and contralto Martine Dupuy, and under the direction of Pier Luigi Pizzi.

The French version was also staged twice at the Rossini Opera Festival: in 2000 starring Michele Pertusi, Ruth Ann Swenson and Giuseppe Filianoti, and in 2017, following the new critical edition by Damien Colas, in a La Fura dels Baus production.