After the initial success of its premiere in 1819 at Teatro La Scala, Rossini’s “Bianca e Falliero” managed to hold its place on Italian stages and beyond for over 10 years before disappearing completely. It was not until 1986 that its first revival in modern times took place, thanks to the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro. The performance proved to be somewhat of a turning point for the opera’s fortunes; if it did not exactly catapult it onto stages across the world, it at least managed to garner sufficient interest from one or two other companies to schedule the occasional performance, as well as giving rise to a number of recordings.
The revival of its fortunes, however, has little to do with Romani’s libretto, which, with its unremarkable plot, is of limited interest. Falliero, a courageous and successful general in the Venetian army, is in love with Bianca, and the pair wish to marry. Her father, Contareno, however, has a very different plan for his daughter.
He wishes her to marry the wealthy Capellio in order to restore the family’s fortunes and spends much of the opera bullying, cajoling and threatening her to acquiesce to his ‘request.’ Such is Bianca and Falliero’s determination to resist Conterano that he eventually relents, and the opera concludes on a happy note. It is, in other words, a storyline typical of the period in which the focus is on creating a series of highly charged emotional conflicts and expressions of love and jealousy for the co.