Verdi was 28 years old and had already suffered the humiliation of a failed comic opera when Nabucco went into rehearsal at La Scala in the winter of 1841–42. The impresario Merelli had essentially dared him to set the libretto. What followed — the premiere on March 9, 1842 — was one of those rare, clean breaks in operatic history, the moment a composer stops being a promising young man and starts being himself. You can hear it in the score: something tightens, something ignites.
Which is why a slack Nabucco is so peculiar a failure. The work practically drives itself.
This new production, filmed at the Teatro Regio in Parma — a house whose very brickwork seems saturated with Verdi, whose audiences have been known to boo a flat high note as though it were a personal affront — gets the musical fundamentals largely right while fumbling, sometimes badly, the dramatic ones. The result is one of those performances you admire in patches and endure in others.
Leo Nucci is the reason to come. He has been singing the title role for longer than some of his colleagues have been alive, and the accumulated intelligence shows in every phrase — the way he shades “Dio di Giuda” with something genuinely harrowed, the coiled authority he brings to Nabucco‘s moments of tyrannical grandeur before the madness descends. Even so, the production gives him almost nothing to work with physically, and there are moments when he looks less like the King of Babylon than a man waiting for a bus. The big duet with Abigaille in the third part is something else entirely — there, with Dimitra Theodossiou pressing hard against him, the music generates its own dramatic electricity and the staging’s poverty stops mattering.
Theodossiou’s Abigaille deserves particular attention. This is a role that has wrecked more voices than I care to count — its tessitura sits in a register that demands both the cutting edge of a dramatic soprano and the flexibility of a lyric one, and the temptation to simply bludgeon through the difficulties is apparently irresistible to certain singers. Theodossiou resists it. Her tone stays focused even in the most exposed passages, and she brings a genuine sense of menace to the character’s psychological violence — not through shouting, but through precision. That is rarer than it sounds.
Riccardo Zanellato has the right sort of bass for Zaccaria — dark, resonant, capable of filling the Parma house without strain — but the role asks for prophetic fire, and too often he delivers instead a kind of imposing neutrality. The gestures the production allows him don’t help; there is something almost comic about a man who is supposed to be channeling the wrath of Jehovah being reduced to pointing vaguely at the middle distance.
The chorus — and of course in Nabucco the chorus is not a supporting player but a protagonist — sounds well enough in “Va, pensiero,” that great, aching melody in E-flat major that Verdi built from what is essentially a single long breath. But the Hebrews and the Babylonians are distinguished from one another largely by whether or not they are wearing shawls, which in an opera whose entire dramatic architecture rests on the collision of two peoples is a rather remarkable piece of directorial minimalism. Not bold minimalism. Just minimalism.
The competition on disc is formidable. Sinopoli’s 1982 Philips disc with Milnes and Dimitrova remains the one I’d reach for first — it has visceral intensity the present rendition doesn’t quite match — and Muti’s La Scala account from 1986 still sounds like Verdi played by people who had the score in their bloodstream. Against those benchmarks, this Parma production is honorable but not essential.
Still. The Regio is a house that matters, and the project of filming Verdi’s complete operas there is genuinely enterprising. If the later installments find a stage director who understands that opera is not a concert with costumes, they could be something worth having.
