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
The Death of King Edgar king. According to Lois Bragg, it is divisible into six sections, the last four of which share the theme of disaster: While the eighteenth-century historian Samuel Henry already noticed the poem, it is not generally praised for its beauty, and one nineteenth-century critic commented that "it exhibits the muse in the homeliest garb; nor does it contain sufficient of nature or feeling to redeem its rugged barbarity." For historians, the poem evidences an ongoing interest in historical writing in this period. The Death of King Edgar "The Death of King Edgar" is an Old English poem commemorating the death of