Verdi's Simon Boccanegra is a particularly bold work, hardly comparable to his other operas. The composer has designed and created a real musical drama, with high-profile characters and striking solo, duet and ensemble scenes, generally in dark colors. The story of the Genoese Doge Simon Boccanegra, a real person from the 14th century, who has to assert himself politically both internally and externally and is also confronted with a family secret, is brought to life.

First staged at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice in 1857, Verdi took the work back to his composing workshop many years later and decisively reshaped it in many passages with the help of his librettist Arrigo Boito, who would later write the libretti for the two astonishing late works Otello and Falstaff. But even Simon Boccanegra, in the revised version from 1881 performed at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, is a work of pointed musical expression and great emotion.