There is a peculiar romance to beginnings — to the moment before a composer has discovered what he is, before the world has told him who he must become. Verdi was twenty-six when Oberto reached La Scala in November 1839, and the opera bristles with that particular hunger: nothing is yet settled, nothing calcified into manner or mannerism.
The libretto’s origins are tangled, as tangled as early-thirteenth-century Italian civil war deserves. Antonio Piazza wrote something called Rocester, which Temistocle Solera — who would later supply Verdi with Nabucco and its world-altering chorus — reworked and relocated into the brutal factional Italy of the Lombard communes. The plot is, frankly, preposterous: seduction, paternal outrage, a duel, exile, a convent. But then so is the plot of Rigoletto, and nobody complains about that.
What arrests attention here is not the story but the energy underneath it. The cavatina/cabaletta architecture is everywhere — you’d expect nothing else — yet Verdi keeps worrying at the seams, pushing recitative toward something more continuous, letting ensembles accumulate rather than simply conclude. You hear it and think: he’s already impatient with the conventions he hasn’t yet earned the right to break.
This production, filmed at the Teatro Verdi di Busseto — the tiny gem of a house in Verdi’s own birthplace, seating perhaps 300 — is part of the vast “Tutto Verdi” project mounted by the Teatro Regio di Parma. The choice of venue for this particular opera is quietly inspired. Oberto is not a work that needs La Scala; it needs walls close enough to feel the singers breathe. And in Busseto, nobody has to force anything. The voices arrive at the ear whole.
Marian Pentcheva and Francesca Sassu are the discovery here. Their voices are well matched in beauty — both carry that rounded, plummy warmth in the middle register that Italian soprano writing of this period demands — yet clearly differentiated in color and weight. Sassu leans toward the brighter edge, Pentcheva into something darker and more contained. The contrast matters enormously in their scenes together, where Verdi is already exploring the kind of dramatic opposition — between women, between social positions, between moral claims — that will power La traviata and Don Carlos twenty years on.
The men are more than adequate. No more needs to be said, perhaps, than that they don’t embarrass the occasion.
Antonello Allemandi conducts with clean, purposeful energy — no dawdling over the lyrical moments, no showing off. The Parma forces play and sing with alertness, the orchestra’s wind sections particularly crisp in the accompanied recitatives. The staging, such as it is, keeps things sensibly out of the way: grouped tableaux, singers facing front, the whole theatrical vocabulary reduced to what actually serves the music. In a work this early, that’s the right instinct.
There is a bonus item explaining the opera’s history and context, which will be useful to anyone coming to Oberto cold. Most people will be. The opera turns up almost nowhere in the repertoire — a footnote in biographies, a curiosity in Verdi surveys. It is worth considerably more than that status suggests. The themes that will obsess Verdi for the rest of his life — the anguished father, the compromised daughter, the tenor as agent of destruction — are all here, nascent, not yet fully metabolized but unmistakably present.
Essential? No. Revelatory of what Verdi would become? Absolutely. And in a interpretation this committed and this cleanly recorded, the case makes itself.
