About the work
Maometto II is an opera in two acts by Gioachino Rossini to a libretto by Cesare della Valle, based on his own verse drama Anna Erizo. It premiered on 3 December 1820 at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples.
Plot
During the Ottoman siege of the Venetian fortress of Negroponte in the fifteenth century, Anna, daughter of the Venetian commander Paolo Erisso, loves a stranger who turns out to be Sultan Mahomet II. When he offers her marriage in exchange for sparing her father, Anna chooses her country: as her late mother wished, she marries the general Calbo and sacrifices herself for Venice.
Cultural significance
With its extended, through-composed ensemble scenes, the work is considered one of the musically most demanding pieces of Rossini's Naples period; for Venice in 1822 he wrote an alternative happy ending. Only a late-twentieth-century rediscovery brought the tragic original version back to the stage.