History-Based Operas

Most people in my family are sick unto death of this particular rant of mine.  Yes, it's true that I tend to be partial to particular cases in history and will complain vigorously if too many liberties are taken when writing adaptations of such events.  Sometimes I will let such liberties be for one reason or another.
          
I hate Franz Schiller with a passion.  It was he who wrote a play about Mary Steward that slanderous toward Good Queen Bess, which Donizetti made into Maria Stuarda, Part-Two a three-part melodrama that wrecked English history something awful.  And I happen to be a huge fan of Queen Elizabeth I.  
       Then again, Schiller also wrote Don Carlos, the play off of which Verdi's opera Don Carlo is based, and Don Carlo is one that I like.  You're beginning to see my bias here.  However, the reason I enjoy Don Carlo and spit bullets at Maria Stuarda has to do with knowing what sources were.  I have absolutely no idea where Schiller got the idea for Maria Stuarda, but I do know where he got his source for Don Carlo: Philip II of Spain did not allow people write biographies about during his lifetime.  After his death, the people wrote his biographies were mostly those who had gotten the short end of the stick during his reign.  And some of them were as twisty as corkscrews themselves.  The biography used for Schiller's play (and later Verdi's opera), was actually written one of these corrupt politicians who was trying to cover his own tail.  So I can watch Don Carlo knowing full well that there is an unreliable narrator, but it's much harder to watch Maria Stuarda because I don't know the source.  Still, I can't watch or listen to Don Carlo without laughing.  

 There is one history-based opera that I can listen to without trouble and that is another Verdi opera called Un Ballo in Maschera (which I have seen thrice).  This opera is a unique example because it was in Development Hell for quite some time.  The opera in based off of the real-life assassination of King Gustavus III of Sweden.  Many productions today use the original Swedish characters.  But when Verdi was first working on it, Italy was in a time of upheaval.  The censors panned the opera because of the story centering around the murder of a crowned king, and Italy was still ruled by a monarchy.  So the censors didn't want anyone getting any bright ideas about killing the king. So Verdi wound up resetting the opera in Colonial Boston and demoting the king to a governor in order to please the censors. 
      
    Because Un Ballo in Maschera has all sorts of alterations, I can enjoy more than Donizetti's Tudor Trilogy.  This because the latter keeps the historical domain characters and tries to throw in a lot of melodrama that wasn't needed; whereas the former had to be reset and rewritten, essentially with different characters (hence why I refer to the baritone as Renato Ankarstrom).  I can enjoy Don Carlo because I know there was a particular source for it, but even so I still laugh at it.  The Tudor Trilogy will always be the worst three operas of all time in my book.