About the work
Boccaccio is a comic operetta in three acts by Franz von Suppé, with a libretto by Camillo Walzel (writing as F. Zell) and Richard Genée that spins motifs from Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron into a plot centred on the poet himself. It premiered on 1 February 1879 at the Carltheater in Vienna and is regarded as the high point of Suppé's operetta output.
Plot
In fourteenth-century Florence, Boccaccio's outspoken tales cause a stir: the city's women adore the poet, while their husbands and fathers want him driven out of town. Disguised as a cooper's apprentice, Boccaccio mingles with the crowd, draws his opponents into amorous entanglements of their own, and finally wins the hand of the duke's daughter Fiammetta.
Cultural significance
With numbers such as the serenade “Hab' ich nur deine Liebe”, Boccaccio ranks alongside Die Fledermaus and Der Bettelstudent among the most widely performed nineteenth-century operettas; it was quickly translated into numerous languages and filmed twice, in 1936 and 1940.