Nabucco
Met Opera Live
Callas, writing to her husband Meneghini from Naples in 1949, where she was performing a run of Verdi’s Nabucco for the only time in her life, said ‘the opera itself has beautiful music, but it’s also a big bore!’ That seems just, but it goes on being done fairly often, mainly on the strength of the chorus ‘Va, pensiero’, Italy’s unofficial national anthem, and of Abigaille’s Act III aria and the meaty part for the title character, who is provided with one of the relatively few baritone mad scenes, and ends up as a convert to the Hebrew god. The plot is rather complicated, considering there are only five main characters, who are locked in relationships of concealed fatherhood, elaborate deceptions and religious hostilities.
The first thing to be grateful for is that Elijah Moshinsky didn’t take the opportunity, irresistible to almost all operatic directors over the past thirty years, to turn Verdi’s drama into a contemporary commentary on the Palestine-Israel conflict.
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