About the work
Eine Nacht in Venedig is a three-act operetta by Johann Strauss II, with a libretto by Camillo Walzel (writing as F. Zell) and Richard Genée that drew on the French opéra comique Le Château trompette. Strauss brought out the work on 3 October 1883 at the Neues Friedrich-Wilhelmstädtisches Theater in Berlin, the only time one of his stage works opened outside Vienna.
Plot
During carnival season in eighteenth-century Venice, Duke Guido tries to seduce the wife of Senator Delaqua. A chain of swapped disguises and mistaken identities leaves him instead with the fisherwoman Annina, while the rightful couples are reunited on St Mark's Square.
Cultural significance
The Berlin premiere flopped, blamed on a confusing book, but a reworked version scored a triumph at the Theater an der Wien barely a month later and the piece has remained one of Strauss's most performed stage works ever since. Later arrangements, notably Erich Wolfgang Korngold's of 1923, still shape how it is staged today.