Today, the auditorium of the Teatro La Fenice in Venice glows with a golden luminescence, much as it would have for operas staged during the Carnival season in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even today, after the disastrous fire of 1996 and the restoration in 2003 to a design by the architect Aldo Rossi, modern lighting recreates all the burnished splendor that gilt embellishment, ceiling frescoes, and chandeliers offered to the impresarios, stage designers, composers, singers, and orchestral musicians of Romantic opera and their audiences. These planners and executants demanded and enjoyed an enviable lightness and radiance in their performance spaces even before the revolutionary gas lighting was introduced in 1826. Sophisticated techniques of illumination for stage performances had been developed from the sixteenth century. But by 1825 the authorities in Venice had “repeatedly expressed their displeasure with the way the decoration of the theater auditorium had deteriorated on account of the smoke from the oil-lamps.”

The history of performance and staging at La Fenice is remarkable, not least because, during the period of Carnival from December to March, the operas produced there in the early nineteenth century included two on themes from Ossian, namely Fingallo e Comala (1805) and Ardano e Dartula (1825) by Stefano Pavesi, a productive composer who completed over sixty operas. His most conspicuous triumph, the two-act opera buff a Ser Marcantonio, with a libretto by Angelo Anelli, which was first staged at La Scala, Milan, on September 26, 1810, attained no fewer than fifty-four performances, and subsequent engagements in other theaters followed up to 1831. But his first notable success was Fingallo e Comala, premiered at La Fenice on December 26, 1804, St. Stephen's Day, as the inaugural production of the Carnival season. Pavesi is important because of the political and artistic influences that bore on his career in Venice: first, the rise of Napoleon, and second, the effect on him of the opera by Jean-Francois Le Sueur Ossian, ou les Bardes (1804).

Pavesi was not the first Italian composer to be drawn to the Ossian poems as a source for the musical stage.