Nabucco

by Guiseppe Verdi
Houston Symphony, Houston Grand Opera Chorus
Patrick Summers, conductor
Performers listed below

If we believe Giuseppe Verdi, there was a time, early in his career, when he decided that opera just wasn't his thing, when history almost was robbed of all but two of Verdi's 28 operas. According to the great man's later recollections, he was down in the dumps after the dismal failure of his second opera, King for a Day. Verdi was so depressed, he said, that he concluded there was absolutely no future in opera for him -- there was simply no choice but to give up composing.

Then, one day on the streets of Milan, he bumped into the impresario of La Scala, a fellow named Merelli. As luck would have it, Merelli held an uncomposed libretto in his hands, and he, more or less, bullied Verdi into looking at it. Verdi agreed against, as he put it, his "better judgement."

Verdi was known to exaggerate when describing his early career: He once referred to his most successful early years as, "my days in the galley," referring to the sort common to the lives of slaves. His alledged abandonment of opera may not have been quite as final as he portrayed it. In any case, he found Merelli's libretto irresistible and before long, that story became his third opera, Nabucco.

Though Nabucco isn't a "grand opera" in the technical sense, it is grand. The libretto's larger-than-life settings and struggles demand vivid ensembles, massive choruses, and knock-em-dead arias. Verdi delivered. To be sure Nabucco, at times, displays the sort of "oom-pah-pah" orchestration that betrays Verdi's early operas. And it may lack the telling theatrical details that distinguish his later works. But the music still carries that hard-to-define thrill that's unique to the work of a top-shelf composer. And that's been more than enough drama needed to hold the stage for over 150 years.

Nabucco was also Verdi's first great triumph: It set his whole career in motion. At the end of that career, Va pensiero, a then-famous chorus, was given an impromptu performance at Verdi's own funeral procession, six decades or so after it's composition.

Of course, it also sounds pretty good from Texas, the source of the production of we'll hear this week by Houston Grand Opera. So tune in NPR World of Opera, with host Steve Curwood, for Nabucco, the opera that saved Giuseppe Verdi's career!



Performers:
Sergei Leiferkuss (Nabucco); Phyllis Pancella (Fenena); Samuel Ramey (Zaccaria); Rafael Rojas (Ismael); Tiffany Jackson (Anna); Oren Gradus (High Priest); Scott Scully (Abdallo)

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