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On November 10, 1862, La forza del destino made its debut at the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg. The previous year Verdi had been courted for a long time by the direction of the Russian theatre, who had persuaded him to accept the position, ensuring him an excellent remuneration and the
possibility of choosing libretto, librettist and interpreters. At first the maestro had thought of Hugo's Ruy Blas, discarding it shortly afterwards in favour of the Spanish novel Don Alvaro o La forza del destino by Ángel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, a drama defined by Verdi as “powerful, singular and vast”. Writing for the Russian public, accustomed to eighteenth-century Italian opera but also to French grand opéra, meant for Verdi to experiment with new dramaturgical solutions. The plot of the work, then, in which several stories are intertwined against a background teeming with characters, lent itself well to the mixture of styles and registers. The result was a synthesis between aristocratic drama and popular comedy, a characteristic feature of a work that was never fully understood. But still, it was close to Verdi’s heart, as is shown by the care he took in revising it years later for Milan, where it debuted on February 27, 1869. In the Scala version, beside the addition of the famous symphony, in which the motif of ineluctable fate appears, Verdi decided to change the ending. The drama of offended honour that ended with the violent deaths of the three protagonists no longer convinced him. And so, with the collaboration of Antonio Ghislanzoni, who in the meantime had taken over from Piave, he opted for a Manzoni-style finale, which sees Don Alvaro repent and survive Leonora's death.

With the collaboration of Naxos