For his first commission for the Paris Opéra Verdi demanded a libretto that was “immense, passionate and original”. What he eventually got from star author Eugène Scribe was a text whose political edginess rivalled the grand opéras of Giacomo Meyerbeer, with whom Scribe had collaborated on LES HUGUENOTS and LE PROPHETE. Like these two works, LES VÊPRES SICILIENNES explored a subject that was not only historical but also highly topical. Parallels could easily be drawn between the “Sicilian Vespers” uprising in 1282 against the island’s French occupiers and the most conspicuous of France’s mid-19th-century expansionist ventures, the conquest and colonialization of Algeria, which began in 1830 and was dogged by an ongoing series of brutally quelled revolts