Verdi called the years between 1844 and 1850 his “years in the galleys,” and he meant it without any romantic irony. The pace was brutal — opera after opera ground out under contract pressure, with barely time to hear one work properly before the next libretto arrived. Alzira, his eighth opera, composed in 1845 for the San Carlo in Naples, belongs squarely to that exhausted stretch, and Verdi himself later dismissed it with a single devastating word: “brutto.” Ugly. He wasn’t entirely wrong, though he was perhaps unfair to himself in the way that only a man who knew he was capable of better could be.
The commission came with genuine inducements. Naples and its San Carlo carried enormous prestige — the house still bore the imprint of Barbaja, that extraordinary impresario who had essentially imported Rossini and reshaped Italian operatic culture in the process. And the librettist attached to the project was Salvatore Cammarano, who had crafted Lucia di Lammermoor for Donizetti with such dramatic instinct that his reputation stood at the apex of the profession after Romani’s effective retirement. These were not trivial attractions for a young composer still consolidating his name beyond Milan and Venice.
The problem was Voltaire. Cammarano’s source was Alzire, a philosophical tragedy set among the Incas of colonial Peru — Voltaire using the exotic setting to argue for religious tolerance and natural human goodness against the brutalities of Spanish conquest. Noble enough in 1736. By 1845, filtered through the conventions of mid-century Italian opera seria, the material had calcified into something stiff and schematic. The characters announce their moral positions and then sing them loudly. There is no room to breathe.
There are moments in Alzira — scattered, almost accidental — where the music breaks through the constraints of its own context and you hear something unmistakably Verdian with an urgency that anticipates Il trovatore by nearly a decade. The baritone villain Gusmano has music of real menace. The final scene, in which Gusmano forgives his killer as he dies, reaches for something genuinely unexpected — the kind of moral complexity Verdi would handle with far greater craft in Simon Boccanegra but was already, here, beginning to feel his way toward.
C Major’s Tutto Verdi project — all twenty-six operas recorded in association with the Teatro Regio in Parma and its Verdi Festival during the bicentenary year — was an undertaking of extraordinary ambition. The first eight issues arrived as fully staged productions; Alzira, which should have been eighth in sequence, was initially skipped in favor of Attila (a substitution that made reasonable artistic sense, since Attila is at least performable without apology), and now arrives as a semi-staged concert reading. That’s a disappointment, and it’s worth saying plainly. The Attila from Busseto’s tiny Teatro Verdi — intimate, sharply focused, the small scale working paradoxically in the music’s favor — was a revelation. One had hoped for something similar here.
A concert performance is not automatically a lesser thing. There’s a case to be made that Alzira, with its static dramatic architecture, might actually benefit from being released from the obligation to move around a stage. What the format requires absolutely, though, is singing of such authority that the music carries its own theatrical weight. The score cannot coast on spectacle it doesn’t have.
Whether this recording fully delivers that is a question with a complicated answer. The conducting has clarity and genuine understanding of Verdian phrasing — the cabalettas are driven without being merely rushed, and there’s evident care for the inner voices of the orchestra, which in Alzira carry more of the dramatic burden than they’re usually given credit for. The prelude alone, with its evocation of Andean landscape filtered through the conventions of 1840s Italian opera, rewards close listening. Verdi’s orchestration at this period is leaner than it would become — there’s a transparency that a good maestro can use rather than merely endure.
The vocal casting matters enormously in this repertoire, and here the results are mixed — not disastrously, but genuinely mixed, the kind of honest unevenness that characterizes a live festival production rather than a studio release assembled from the best available singers regardless of geography. The soprano in the title role has genuine warmth in the middle voice; she phrases with intelligence and doesn’t push where pushing would only expose limitations. The tenor is more problematic. Zamoro — the Incan warrior hero — demands heroic weight and the ability to float a long melodic line simultaneously, which is an almost impossible combination to find in a single throat. What’s on offer here is earnest and committed without quite being convincing.
Alzira will probably never enter the repertory in any sustained way. It lacks the melodic density of the mature works and the raw theatrical electricity of Nabucco or Ernani. But it is not nothing. For the student of Verdi’s development, and for anyone seriously engaged with how a composer learns — not from success but from the specific texture of his failures — it is indispensable. The Tutto Verdi project serves history by including it rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
That said, a semi-staged concert performance feels like a half-measure for a work that needed either the imaginative staging Attila received in Busseto or the controlled intimacy of a purely concert presentation with the best possible singers front and center. What’s here falls between those stools. Worth owning if you’re completing the series. Worth watching with the score in hand. Not worth pretending it’s more than it is.
