Royal Swedish Opera architect Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz was commissioned by King Gustav III, a strong adherent of the ideal of an enlightened absolutism and as such was a great patron of the arts. The Swedish Opera company had first been located in Bollhuset, but there was a need to separate the Opera from the theatre and give them separate buildings. Construction began in 1775 and the theatre was inaugurated on 30 September 1782 with a performance of the German composer Johann Gottlieb Naumann's "Cora och Alonzo". It was also the place for public masquerade balls, events inspired from the famous opera-balls in Paris,
Attila (opera) Attila (opera) Attila is an opera in a prologue and three acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Temistocle Solera, based on the 1809 play "" ("Attila, King of the Huns") by Zacharias Werner. The opera received its first performance at La Fenice in Venice on 17 March 1846. Ezio's act 2 aria of heroic resolution ' ("My lot is cast, I am prepared for any warfare") is a fine example of a characteristic Verdian "genre", and it achieved fame in its own time with audiences in the context of the adoption of a liberal constitution by Ferdinand