Le siège de Corinthe (English: The Siege of Corinth) is an opera in three acts by Gioachino Rossini set to a French libretto by Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet, which was based on the reworking of some of the music from the composer's 1820 opera for Naples, Maometto II, the libretto of which was written by Cesare della Valle. Le siège was Rossini's first French opera (known also in its Italian version as L'assedio di Corinto) and was first given at the Salle Le Peletier of the Paris Opéra on 9 October 1826 Composition history The opera commemorates the siege and ultimate destruction of the town of Missolonghi in 1826 by Turkish troops during the ongoing Greek War of Independence (1821–1829). The same incident – condemned throughout Western Europe for its cruelty – also inspired a prominent painting by Eugène Delacroix (Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi), and was mentioned in the writings of Victor Hugo. The reference to Corinth is an example of allegory, although Sultan Mehmed II had indeed besieged the city in the 1450s. Lord Byron's 1816 poem The Siege of Corinth has little, if any, connection with the opera as to its content. Liszt wrote an Introduction and Variations for piano based on a march from this opera. That work was deemed lost or mistitled until 1976 when the introduction was discovered by Nancy B. Reich at Manhattanville College's library. Revised version of Maometto II The French version of this late Rossini opera was a partial rewrite of the composer's 1820 Italian opera, Maometto II, but with the same story and similar if differently named characters, in the setting of the Turks' 1470 conquest of the Venetian colony of Negroponte. That original version had premiered in Naples on 3 December 1820 – six years before the Missolonghi siege and massacre. The original Maometto was not well received, neither in Naples nor in Venice where Rossini tried out a somewhat revised version in 1823, this time with a happy ending using music from his own La donna del lago at the conclusion. But in 1826, two years after settling in Paris, Rossini tried yet again, with yet another version (which included two ballets, as called for by French operatic tradition), transplanted it to the Peloponnese with the new title Le siège de Corinthe in a topical nod to the then-raging Greek war for independence from the