Il Trovatore is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an
Italian libretto largely written by Salvadore Cammarano, based on the play El
trovador (1836) by Antonio García Gutiérrez. It was Gutiérrez's most successful
play, one which Verdi scholar Julian Budden describes as "a high flown,
sprawling melodrama flamboyantly defiant of the Aristotelian unities, packed
with all manner of fantastic and bizarre incident.