Music: Pre-Vintage Verdi

“With this opera,” said Giuseppe Verdi, “my artistic career has begun.” He was speaking of Nabucco, the opera about Nebuchadnezzar that set him at the age of 28 in the top rank of operatic composers. Rarely performed now, even in Italy, Nabucco made only a few brief appearances on the Manhattan stage and then disappeared for nearly a century. Back last week as the curtain raiser for the Metropolitan Opera’s 76th season, it proved to be an intriguing if occasionally turgid preview of genius still seeking a proper voice.

Had Nabucco failed at its premiere at La Scala in 1842, chances are that Verdi’s career would have failed with it. His first opera, Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio, had been only a mild success, and the second, Un Giorno di Regno, had been hissed offstage by the opening-night audience. A year before he started work on Nabucco, Verdi had seen his two children and his wife die within 21 months of one another. Insisting that he would never write another opera, Verdi was drawn to Nabucco in spite of himself. After he reluctantly agreed to read the libretto (by Temistocle Solera, a minor 19th century poet), he found himself writing “one day a verse, the next day another; one time a note, another a phrase, and little by little the opera.” The subject was a natural for mid-igth century Italy: the captivity of the Jews under King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, reminiscent to Italian audiences of their own fate under Austrian rule. The third act chorus of chained prisoners, “Va’, pensiero” (“Go, thought, on wings of gold”), became an immediate hit all across Italy.

Stand Up & Sing. Tne music of Nabucco was different from anything the earlier giants of Italian opera—Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti—had ever attempted. The choral writing was stronger, the general style more impassioned. Already Verdi was using his subsequently famous technique of writing sprightly, almost gay tunes for the grimmest situations and somehow getting away with it. Nabucco’s weakness is that it has in its score little dramatic unity and that it tends to bog down in mere declamation (“It’s one of those stand-up-there-and-sing operas,” says Baritone Cornell MacNeil).

The Met’s new production did little to improve matters. The singing—by Baritone MacNeil in the title role, Soprano Leonie Rysanek and Mezzo-Soprano Rosalind Elias as the evil and good daughters of the King, Bass Cesare Siepi as a Jewish high priest—was generally good but rarely inspired. Conductor Thomas Schippers (who at 30 is the youngest conductor ever to open a Met season) whipped his orchestra through the score at a soprano-searing pace. The sets by Teo Otto and Wolfgang Roth were contradictory in style: an ornate realistic idol in one scene, a starkly abstract grillwork in another. Although it took in a record $91,482 at the box office, the Met’s new Nabucco was not likely to join vintage Verdi in the regular repertory. One reason was suggested by Arrigo Boito, the great librettist of Verdi’s old age. The music would never be as powerfully appealing, Boito felt, to audiences not bred on Italian soil and breathing Italian air.

Triumph & Tension. A more impressive contribution to the Met’s new season came later in the week with a Boris Godunov, orchestrated by Dmitry Shostakovich. In its 75-year history, Mussorgsky’s roughhewn but powerfully felt work (“I lived on Boris and in Boris,” the composer once said) has appeared in several versions, including two by the composer himself and two schmalzier ones by his friend Rimsky-Korsakov. This season the Met decided to try the version scored by Shostakovich in 1940 but never before presented on the U.S. stage. The result is a brassy, full-throated Boris, stridently dramatic and highly colored (especially when compared with the thinner, drier orchestration of Boris by Karol Rathaus previously used by the Met).

To match the flogging power of the Shostakovich orchestration, a first-rate cast was called for, and the Met supplied it: Giorgio Tozzi, Ezio Flagello, Norman Kelley, Kim Borg, Blanche Thebom. The immense chorus sang the English text (by John Gutman) with both volume and admirable clarity. But the clear triumph of the evening belonged to Baritone George London in the title role. His Boris, which he sang with great success during his recent tour of Russia, was passionate, anguished, suffused with an almost unbearable sense of racking inner tensions. As London played it last week, it clearly belonged among the finest characterizations in opera.