Alfonso und Estrella

Alfonso und Estrella D 732
Romatic Opera in 3 Acts

In late September or early October 1821 Schubert and his close friend, Franz von Schober, vacationed in the countryside of Lower Austria. Their first stopover was at Ochsenburg Castle, which belonged to the Bishop of St. Pölten (a close relative of Schober’s), after which they moved on to St. Pölten itself. Roughly a year earlier, two stage works by Schubert had been performed in Vienna: the one-act singspiel Die Zwillingsbrüder and the melodrama Die Zauberharfe. The librettos were both written by the seasoned Viennese playwright Georg von Hofmann, who blamed the press for the indifferent reception the two works weregiven by the audience. Schubert and Schober now decided, it would seem, to write a grand romantic opera uninfluenced by the workaday world of the theatre and beholden solely to their own ideas of what an opera should be.

Not until 24 June 1854 was the opera finally performed in Weimar, under the baton of Franz Liszt. It only achieved success, however, in an arrangement by Johann Nepomuk Fuchs that was staged on many German and Austrian stages in 1881–2, allegedly with 'brilliant acclaim'.