Verdi: Nabucco (Metropolitan Opera, filmed January 6, 2024; aired January 10, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon (Wednesday, January 10) my husband Charles and I went to the Metropolitan Opera “Live in HD” screening of Verdi’s Nabucco, his third opera and first major hit. One of the commentators in the interminable pre-broadcast features (the advertised start time was 1 p.m. but the opera itself didn’t begin until 1:25; we got a countdown of “5,” “4,” “3,” “2” and “1 minute to Nabucco,” as if we were on a subway and it was the next stop) mentioned that the young Giuseppe Verdi (he was 29 when Nabucco premiered in 1842) had been so broken up by the deaths of his first wife and their children that he had considered not writing any more operas. But Bartolomeo Merelli, the impresario then in charge of La Scala in Milan, was able to force him to compose it. The commentator didn’t explain how Merelli was able to do that: Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio, had been a modest success and on the strength of that Merelli had signed Verdi to a three-opera contract. Unfortunately, the first opera under Merelli’s deal, Un Giorno di Regno – Verdi’s only comic opera until his last one, Falstaff – was a total flop. Merelli then wanted Verdi to set a preposterous libretto by Italian poet Temistocle Solera about the Biblical tale of the enslavement of the ancient Jews under the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar (called “Nabucodonosor,” or “Nabucco” for short, in Solera’s Italian text). The libretto had already been turned down by German composer Otto Nicolai, founder of the Vienna Philharmonic and best known today for his opera Die Lustigen Weiben von Windsor – and his and Verdi’s paths would cross again, albeit only virtually, since Verdi’s Falstaff was based on the same story source, Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.

In the opera, the Hebrews have been transported en masse to Babylon and enslaved. Nabucco (Georgian baritone George Gagnidze) has two daughters, Fenena (mezzo-soprano Maria Barakova) and Abigaille (star soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, originally from Ukraine) – only, while Fenena is Nabucco’s biological daughter, Abigaille is a slave child Nabucco for some reason fostered and raised as his own. Abigaille plots to dethrone Nabucco and take over Babylon herself, and in her chilling calls for revenge (it’s not clear against whom) she sounds like Donald Trump in drag. (Just about any story about a power-mad would-be dictator these days is going to remind me of Trump.) Nabucco’s daughter Fenena has fallen in love with one of the Jews, Ismaele (Korean tenor SeokJong Baek), and has secretly converted to Judaism. Abigaille sees her big chance to grab the throne when Nabucco suddenly announces that he is tearing down the temple to the Babylonian god Baal and that he is now God himself and should be worshiped as such. Just then a bolt of lightning from heaven (quite effectively staged by the Met’s special effects department) strikes down Nabucco and turns him insane. Abigaille grabs the crown and installs herself as ruler, dramatically ripping up the document that proves she’s only a slave. She tricks Nabucco into signing an order for the extermination of the Jews (the Nazi Holocaust was by no means a new idea) and Nabucco signs it, then realizes in horror that among the people he’s just condemned to death is his own daughter Fenena. Meanwhile, the Hebrews sing what’s by far the best-known number in Verdi’s score, “Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate” (“Fly, O Thoughts, on Golden Wings”), a quiet, moving chorus of lament for their lost homeland. “Va, pensiero” became an unofficial anthem for the Risorgimento, the 19th century movement to unify Italy under one government and kick out the Austrian, French and Papal governments that ran quite a lot of it. (Verdi was born in 1813, while Napoleon’s troops still occupied Italy, resulting in the marvelous irony that the birth certificate of this quintessentially Italian artist is in French.) The Risorgimento’s main demand was that Italy be united and put under the rule of Sicilian King Victor Emmanuel, and Verdi’s last name became an acronym for “Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia” (Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy). In 1901 the marchers at Verdi’s funeral spontaneously started singing “Va, pensiero” even though Verdi’s family had stipulated that no music be played at his funeral. (A memorial concert took place a few weeks later featuring the leading Italian tenors of the time: Fernando de Lucia, Francesco Tamagno and Enrico Caruso. I’ve referred to that as the first “Three Tenors” concert.)

I’m really not that familiar with Nabucco as an opera, and the only recording of it I have on commercial CD’s is a terrible-sounding live broadcast from the Teatro San Carlo in Naples from December 20, 1949 with Maria Callas as a stunning Abigaille. (It’s her only surviving performance of the whole role, and she never sang it again complete, though in the early 1960’s when she confined her public singing to concerts, she frequently programmed Abigialle’s big second-act aria, “Anch’io dischiuso un giorno” – “I too once opened my heart to happiness.”) One thing I was surprised about is how well Verdi wrote for chorus; though the choristers have to alternate between playing Babylonians and playing Hebrews, they are a surprisingly integral part of the action. Conductor Daniele Callegari said during an intermission interview that about 60 percent of the music of Nabucco is for the chorus, though I’m not sure whether he meant for the chorus alone or in the big call-and-response scenes in which a solo singer is featured in an aria and the chorus interjects. Nabucco is also the only opera Verdi ever wrote that does not feature an aria for the tenor (which is why it was left out of Carlo Bergonzi’s survey of arias from all Verdi’s other operas, recorded for Philips in the 1970’s), though one Fanfare reviewer wrote he was startled when he received a recital album from an historic tenor and its cover listed an “Aria from Nabucco.” It turned out to be the famous “Va, pensiero” chorus, adapted and reworked for a solo tenor plus orchestra. Mussorgsky was hailed as an innovator when in 1874 he premiered Boris Godunov and gave an unusually prominent role to the chorus, but that’s just more first-itis: Verdi was three decades ahead of him!

Aside from that, Nabucco is pretty much a bel canto opera; recent music critics have pointed out Verdi’s great artistic debt to the bel canto composers, Donizetti in particular (and Donizetti conducted Nabucco in a production in Vienna just a year after the premiere), and in Nabucco Fenena’s music in particular owes a lot to Bellini as well. It seems odd that the Fanfare reviewers keep complaining about an alleged lack of modern-day singers with the qualifications needed for Verdi, when this Met Nabucco was very well-sung indeed, especially by the women. Abigaille is Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska (who used to spell her first name in the Russian fashion, “Ludmilla,” until Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine nearly two years ago led a lot of Ukrainians to change their names to the more traditional Ukrainian spellings, though both Russian and Ukrainian are written in the Cyrillic alphabet and therefore there are understandable differences in the transliterations), who impresses me as one of the three best Verdi sopranos currently alive and active. (The others are Sondra Radvanovsky and Angela Meade.) Verdi wrote Abigaille for the woman who would become his second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, and a lot of his biographers think he foreshortened her career by writing her such difficult and challenging roles. Liudmyla Monastyrska handled it with such ease and assurance she made the role sound easy even though it isn’t, and while her voice doesn’t have the sheer wild-woman abandon of Callas’s (whose has?), she phrases and shapes the music to bring out the dramatic intensity and not just the vocal quality. And she’s matched by an equally extraordinary performance by the Fenena, Maria Barakova, who as the “good girl” to Monastyrska’s “bad girl” handles the Bellinian long lines of her music quite well. In an intermission interview Monastyrska said her favorite roles are Abigaille and Bellini’s Norma, and oh, how I’d love to hear her do Norma with Barakova as the opera’s second female lead, Adalgisa.

The men are less interesting but still capable – though SeokJong Baek looked and sounded a bit out of place, not because he’s Asian (let’s face it, if we could accept African-American soprano Leontyne Price as a teenage Japanese girl in Madama Butterfly, we can surely accept an Asian as a Jew) but because he has no aria and precious little to do, though he was capable enough in his two love duets with Barakova. In the title role, Georgian baritone George Gagnidze turned in the goods without being at all spectacular, and likewise the bass Dmitry Belosselskiy as the Hebrew prophet Zaccaria (Zachariah to you). There are also three oddball characters who hang around the action, including the High Priest of Baal (Le Bu), who’s Abigaille’s partner in her coup d’état. Daniele Callegari conducted with efficiency and sometimes eloquence, notably in the “Va, pensiero” chorus, which he said had to be done pianississimo to make its quiet effect as a prayer. The Met’s scene crew did an effective job, though when I saw the whole set revolve on a giant turntable I remembered the infamous incident when the New Met opened in 1966 with a production of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra with Leontyne Price – and the turntable got stuck during a rehearsal and trapped Price inside a prop pyramid for over half an hour until the stagehands got it fixed and could free her. Overall this Nabucco was a dramatically effective production of an historically important opera that still works as drama despite the sillinesses and ahistoricality (the Wikipedia page on Nabucco, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabucco, contains a whole section on the differences between historical fact, the Biblical narrative and the opera’s plot) of Solera’s libretto, which was based not on the Bible (that would have been too easy!) but on a French play from 1836 and an adaptation of it into an Italian ballet later that year.