Gustavo III (Verdi) to meet commitments regarding "Lear". Finally, in a letter which he wrote to Torelli in September 1857, Verdi confessed that he had "looked through an infinite number of plays...but not one of them will do for me..." but he then described an existing libretto which interested him, one which was written by the French playwright and librettist Eugene Scribe for Daniel Auber's very successful 1833 opera, "Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué": Verdi turned to the historical subject of King Gustav III of Sweden, who was shot while attending a masked ball in Stockholm in 1792 and died thirteen days
Giuseppe Verdi libretto. The Verdis arrived in St. Petersburg in December 1861 for the premiere, but casting problems meant that it had to be postponed. Returning via Paris from Russia on 24 February 1862, Verdi met two young Italian writers, the twenty-year-old Arrigo Boito and Franco Faccio. Verdi had been invited to write a piece of music for the 1862 International Exhibition in London, and charged Boito with writing a text, which became the "Inno delle nazioni". Boito, as a supporter of the grand opera of Giacomo Meyerbeer and an opera composer in his own right, was later in the 1860s critical