 In describing the changes made to the original opera, Budden observes that the revised version has far greater strengths than those acknowledged by many Italian and English writers and that "the diffuse drama which Solera had distilled from an epic poem is replaced by a far tauter, more concentrated plot which not only makes fewer demands on our credulity than "I Lombardi" but also avoids the problem of a second tenor who needs to be weightier and more heroic than the first.