Achille de Lauzières

Achille de Lauzières was born in Naples to a French family and worked in both languages, as a music critic in Paris and as a translator of opera libretti into Italian. Singing translations were a trade rather than an art, a foreign opera reaching the Italian stage in Italian or not at all, and de Lauzières supplied a number of them. His Don Carlo, made in 1866 for the London and Bologna stagings of 1867, outlasted the rest: revised throughout by Angelo Zanardini for Milan in 1884, it remains the text through which Verdi's opera is sung in Italian.