Bartolomeo Merelli (who later, as Intendant at La Scala, was to commission Verdi's first opera), wrote the Italian libretto based on Der Graf von Burgund by August von Kotzebue.
The murder of August von Kotzebue by Karl Sand, however, shocked him out of his revolutionary views, and from this time he tended, under the influence of the writings of Hamann and Herder, more and more in the direction of conservatism and romanticism.
The opera uses the same Italian-language libretto by Bartolomeo Merelli after August von Kotzebue's Der Graf von Burgund that Donizetti used for his Enrico di Borgogna a month earlier, but with different music.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Otto von Bismarck | August Strindberg | Alexander von Humboldt | Wernher von Braun | Carl Maria von Weber | Herbert von Karajan | August | Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher | John von Neumann | Lars von Trier | Ferdinand von Mueller | Paul von Hindenburg | Alexander von Humboldt Foundation | Heinrich von Kleist | Anne Sofie von Otter | Erich von Stroheim | Papal conclave, August 1978 | Max von Sydow | Justus von Liebig | Stanisław August Poniatowski | Hermann von Helmholtz | Franz von Papen | Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg | Carl von Clausewitz | Von Ryan's Express | Richard von Weizsäcker | August Derleth | Theodore von Kármán | Pernilla August |
One Russian explorer, August von Kotzebue reported noted that Chinese or Filipino traders from Manila sailed to Palau and Yap to sell dragon jars to the islanders during the early to mid 19th century.