La gazza ladra
opera semiseria by Gioacchino Rossini
La gazza ladra (Italian pronunciation: [la ˈɡaddza ˈlaːdra], The Thieving Magpie) is a opera semiseria in two acts by Gioachino Rossini, with a libretto by Giovanni Gherardini based on La pie voleuse by Théodore Baudouin d'Aubigny and Louis-Charles Caigniez.
The Thieving Magpie's overture uses snare drums to evoke the image of the opera's main subject: a devilishly clever, thieving magpie.
Rossini wrote quickly, and La gazza ladra was no exception. A 19th-century biography quotes him as saying that the conductor of the premiere performance locked him in a room at the top of La Scala the day before the premiere with orders to complete the opera's still unfinished overture. He was under the guard of four stagehands whose job it was to toss each completed page out the window to the copyist below.
Performance history
The first performance of The Thieving Magpie was on 31 May 1817, at La Scala, Milan. In 1818, Rossini revised the opera for subsequent productions in Pesaro; and then in 1819 for the Teatro del Fondo, in Naples; in 1820 for the Teatro di San Carlo, in Naples; and in 1866 he revised the music for performance in Paris. The 1866 revision included embellishments and variations written specifically for Giuseppina Vitali, who was singing the role of Ninetta. He revised the role again in 1867 with embellishments and cadenzas for Adelina Patti.
The first performance of The Thieving Magpie in England was at the King's Theatre, London, on 10 March 1821.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q472318. VIAF identifies the subject as 176607489. The Library of Congress control number is n82013173. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1817, 1818, 1819 and 1820.
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This entry incorporates text from “La gazza ladra” 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.