Ivanhoé Ivanhoé Ivanhoé is an 1826 pastiche opera in three acts with music by Gioachino Rossini to a French-language libretto by Émile Deschamps and Gabriel-Gustave de Wailly, after Walter Scott's novel of the same name. The music was adapted, with the composer's permission, by the music-publisher Antonio Pacini from Rossini's operas, namely "Semiramide", "La Cenerentola", "La gazza ladra", and "Tancredi" in order to introduce his music to Paris. An examination of the score shows that Pacini also used music from "Bianca e Faliero", "Armida", "Maometto II", "Aureliano in Palmira", "Sigismondo", "Torvaldo e Dorliska", "Mosè in Egitto" and an amount of newly
La Scala into a costume. As with most of the theatres at that time, La Scala was also a casino, with gamblers sitting in the foyer. Conditions in the auditorium, too, could be frustrating for the opera lover, as Mary Shelley discovered in September 1840: At the Opera they were giving Otto Nicolai's "Templario". Unfortunately, as is well known, the theatre of La Scala serves, not only as the universal drawing-room for all the society of Milan, but every sort of trading transaction, from horse-dealing to stock-jobbing, is carried on in the pit; so that brief and far between are the snatches