Anna Pirozzi reviews

Just four years after its 1844 premiere, Verdi described this early opera as ‘a funeral with too uniform an atmosphere and colour from beginning to end’. There is some justification for this criticism: the opera presents a single dramatic situation that worsens rather than alters over the course of its three acts. Nevertheless it offers central roles with considerable potential, notably that of the elder of the two Foscari of the title – the Venetian doge unable to save his son from exile and himself from humiliating dismissal.