It occurred to Verdi that, since all of Europe had been decreed forbidden territory, the New World might be the most congenial of the remaining possibilities (many of which were tried in one production or another), and he selected the northerly city of Boston in the time of English rule. This strikes Americans as incongruous, both on historical grounds and in the light of the banned-in-Boston, blue-law reputation the city’s had up into our own lifetimes. If America is to be the land of choice, then from the viewpoint of cultural milieu  New Orleans in the ante-bellum era would certainly be the leading candidate for the setting of the opera.^(I) However, there is no reason for America to be the land of choice. The solution is actually obvious, and it is the originally intended one, which has the added value of re-connecting the opera to its historical origins and, incidentally, removing the racial miasma that has hovered around the character of Ulrica.

When I characterized Ballo as “mature, taut and compact, and full-blooded,” I was not trying to distinguish it from the preceding great triptych of Rigoletto, Traviata, and Trovatore, nor from the succeeding one of Aïda, Otello, and Falstaff, which are all those things. But Ballo stands alone in several ways among the works that separated those grouped trios. It gave the composer only the troubles he normally experienced in the creation of a new piece—quite enough, of course, but fairly quickly done and subject to no subsequent revisions, this last in contrast to his experience with Simon Boccanegra, La Forza del destino, and Don Carlo(s), of which the first two required major re-writes, and Carlo the elimination of a full act and accommodation to an Italian translation to make its international way.^(II) Further: Simon‘s plot embraces two generations, with the necessary passage of years, its action continuous only in the final act; Forza takes on epic proportions and qualities, spreading itself against a background of war across Spain and Italy over an indeterminate period that covers at least months; and while only the five-act Don Carlos offers much geographic distribution, even its conjoined four-act twin entails several settings and durations of time. We could draw a fairly straight, ever-thickening line through these four operas in terms of their increasingly epic nature (“sprawling” is a commonly applied adjective), complexity, and weight.