“I due Foscari” (The Two Foscari) is based on a tragedy by Lord Byron. The three-act opera by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) was premiered in Rome in 1844 and was thought by the music world at that time to be evidence of Verdi’s talent. He himself judged his work more severely: “Material that is of its very nature gloomy inevitably awakens, if one is not careful, yawning boredom.” It is true that the premiere did not represent a triumph for Verdi, but it was not a failure, either. The reserved reaction to the opera can be traced not least to the fact that the manager of the Teatro Argentina in Rome raised the ticket prices on the evening of the premiere and that the singers’ performance was unconvincing. Also the fact that the two male protagonists, Jacopo and Francesco Foscari, did not act according to their social station but rather that Lucrezia drove the plot forward was very unusual and new for conditions at that time. The instrumentation of the opera is less opulent than that of his preceding operas. Thus Verdi’s use of individual winds, primarily the clarinet, enriches the sound, and his technique of assigning musical themes to signify characters – much like Wagner’s leitmotifs – enables his work to coalesce into a tightly structured opera.