La tempesta (opera)
Italian Opera
La tempesta is an Italian-language opera composed by Fromental Halévy with a libretto by Eugène Scribe based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The opera, commissioned by Benjamin Lumley for the Italian opera in London, premiered at Her Majesty's Theatre on 8 June 1850 with Filippo Coletti as Prospero, Henrietta Sontag as Miranda, Carlotta Grisi as Ariel, and Luigi Lablanche as Caliban.
Eugène Scribe's libretto was translated into Italian, since operas were rarely performed in languages other than Italian in 19th-century London.
Felix Mendelssohn had been originally commissioned to compose the score, but, according to Henry Chorley, he ‟positively rejected the book as written by M. Scribe, and had declined to compose it until it was wholly remodeled”.
The opera was revived at the Wexford Opera Festival in 2022.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “La tempesta (opera)” is italian Opera. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through tempesta, opera and Italian, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “italian Opera” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q119872744. The first chronological checks are 1850 and 2022.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “La tempesta (opera)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.