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,
Giuseppe Verdi and fugues...No-one taught me orchestration or how to handle dramatic music." He is known to have written a variety of music for the Busseto Philharmonic society, including vocal music, band music and chamber works, (and including an alternative overture to Rossini's "Barber of Seville") but few of these works survive. (He may have given instructions before his death to destroy his early works). Verdi uses in his early operas (and, in his own stylized versions, throughout his later work) the standard elements of Italian opera content of the period, referred to by the opera writer Julian Budden as the 'Code