A Florentine Tragedy is a fragment of a never-completed play by Oscar Wilde. The subject concerns Simone, a wealthy 16th-century Florentine merchant who finds his wife Bianca in the arms of a local prince, Guido Bardi. After feigning hospitality, Simone challenges the interloper to a duel, disarms him, and strangles him. This awakens the affection of his wife; and the two are reconciled.
In 1914 the young Italian composer Carlo Ravasegna (Turin 1891-Rome 1964) wrote a short opera titled Una tragedia fiorentina to a translation/libretto by Ettore Moschino. The libretto was published with Wilde's name by the Tipografia Subalpina, Turin, 1914.
Giacomo Puccini considered Wilde's play as a potential source material for a new opera before discarding it.
Sergei Prokofiev wrote his opera Maddalena to his own libretto based on a play by Magda Gustavovna Lieven-Orlova written under the pen name Baron Lieven. That play was in turn based on Oscar Wilde's play. The opera had its premiere in a BBC studio recording in London in 1979; and its first live staging was in Graz (Austria) in 1981.
T. Sturge Moore wrote an opening scene for this play for "presentation" purposes.[2]
In 1989, Caspar René Hirschfeld wrote a chamber opera titled Bianca based on the Florentine Tragedy. He used the German translation by Max Meyerfeld. Filling in for the absent first scene, a love scene between Bianca and the prince, Hirschfeld used love poetry from Oscar Wilde himself. The opera was first performed at the Salzburg Festival in 1991.