Un giorno di regno
Un giorno di regno, ossia Il finto Stanislao (A One-Day Reign, or The Pretend Stanislaus, but often translated into English as King for a Day) is an operatic melodramma giocoso in two acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto written in 1818 by Felice Romani. Originally written for the Bohemian composer Adalbert Gyrowetz[1][2] the libretto was based on the play Le faux Stanislas written by the Frenchman Alexandre-Vincent Pineux Duval in 1808.[1] Un giorno was given its premiere performance at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan on 5 September 1840.
Un giorno di regno
Il finto Stanislao
Italian
Alexandre-Vincent Pineux Duval's play, Le faux Stanislas
After the success of his first opera, Oberto in 1839, Verdi received a commission from La Scala impresario Merelli to write three more operas. Un giorno was first of the three, but he wrote the piece during a period when first his children and then his wife died and its failure in 1840 caused the young composer to almost abandon opera. It was not until he was enticed to write the music for the existing libretto of what became Nabucco that Verdi restarted his career.
Composition history[edit]
After Oberto and after Merelli returned from Vienna in early 1840, he needed a comedy to be written for the autumn season. Asked to select a libretto by Romani which already existed, Verdi notes that he did not like any of them but "because the matter was of some urgency, I chose the one which seemed to me to be the least bad".[3]
Music[edit]
The music of the piece shows the influence of Rossini and Donizetti. The haste in which the work was written may account for some of the uneven quality some critics have noted.[19] With regard to the recitatives, Gossett notes that "only his youthful comic opera, Un giorno di regno (1840), uses secco recitative".[20]
A critic at the UK premiere found a "soprano solo with female chorus of a kind that looks back to 'O beau pays de Touraine' in Les Huguenots" and "forward to Maria Boccanegra's 'Come in quest" ora bruna'"; he also sensed an "extraordinary foretaste of Falstaff in the servants' chorus which opens Act 2", and the "finale of the first act has already suggested a vein that Verdi was to exploit in Un Ballo in Maschera", while "in Act 2, Scene 2, the duet for Belfiore and the Marchesa, 'Si mostri a chi l'adora', has an orchestral introduction of an astonishingly chromatic nature".[10]
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