Preview: Riccardo Chailly conducts Nabucodonosor, opening tonight at La Scala
Nabucodonosor opens tonight, 16 May, for a nine-performance run with outgoing music director, Riccardo Chailly, conducting his tenth Verdi title at La Scala. It will be the 210th time that the opera has been performed at the theatre.
The opera’s premiere was at La Scala on 9 March 1842, and it has remained in the repertoire since the mid-19th century under the shortened title Nabucco, which it was given in 1844 during a revival in Corfu.
The divertissement will be heard for the first time in a staged performance, a piece Verdi wrote for the opera’s revival in Brussels in 1848. It was rediscovered in 2021 by scholar Knud Arne Jürgensen and has so far been performed only in concert.
Chailly says,
Composed six years after the debut of Nabucodonosor for the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, it was performed then and then disappeared, only to re-emerge among the papers, long inaccessible, kept at [Verdi’s former home] Sant’Agata. Today, we present its first modern staged performance.
It is a substantial piece, lasting about ten minutes, beginning with a splendid solo by the cello, which echoes the timbre with which the opera closes. It is a beautiful solo, an extraordinary melody supported by a very elegant accompaniment.
Verdi came to Nabucodonosor after the unequivocal failure of his second opera, Un giorno di regno. A professional setback intertwined with a tremendous family tragedy – the loss, in less than two years, of his wife and two young children.
The then director of La Scala, Bartolomeo Merelli, supposedly forced Verdi, whom he met on the street during a heavy snowfall, to consider a libretto rejected by the German opera composer Otto Nicolai. Verdi reached his rooms in what is now Corso Vittorio Emanuele, and threw the libretto to the ground, which ‘miraculously’ opened to the text of ‘Va’ pensiero’ and piqued his curiosity.
In its grandeur – says Chailly – Nabucodonosor gives me a sense of dizziness. What is astonishing is the genesis of this masterpiece, which was born unintentionally from a young composer who was intending to abandon his opera career and was completely unproductive for many months. This opera represents the true beginning, as Verdi himself acknowledged, of one of the most important careers in opera history.
The dizziness arises, in studying the score, from the constant alternation of new situations – a disconcerting effect that makes Nabucodonosor a title that is not tranquil, which will always be debated, attracting both admirers and detractors, as has been the case since the late nineteenth century, but it will always return to the stage.
For his last operatic engagement as Music Director (though Chailly will conduct Verdi’s Requiem on 28 October and will regularly return to La Scala in the coming years), the Maestro reunites with Anna Netrebko (Abigaille), Luca Salsi (Nabucodonosor), Francesco Meli (Ismaele), and Michele Pertusi (Zaccaria). This team has accompanied him in some memorable openings of the opera season: Giovanna d’Arco (7 December 2015, Netrebko and Meli), Andrea Chénier (7 December 2017, Netrebko and Salsi), Tosca (7 December 2019, Netrebko, Meli, and Salsi), Macbeth (7 December 2021, Netrebko, Meli, and Salsi), Don Carlo (7 December 2023, Pertusi, Netrebko, Meli, and Salsi), La forza del destino (7 December 2024, Anna Netrebko), to which can be added masses and concerts.
The company is completed by Veronica Simeoni (Fenena), Simon Lim (High Priest), Haiyang Guo (Amonasro), and Laura Lolita Perešivana (Anna).
The director, Alessandro Talevi, is one of the most established directors in Italian theatre (he was born in Johannesburg and is now based in Turin) and internationally, thanks to the imaginative strength of his productions. Following the recent revival of Tosca at Rome Opera, upcoming engagements include the revival of Onegin at Santa Fe Opera, a new production of Rigoletto in Cagliari, and the Don Giovanni tour for Opera North.
Sets and costumes are by Gary McCann, lighting and video by Marco Giusti, choreography by Danilo Rubeca, acrobatic movements by Ran Arthur Braun, and magical effects by Masters of Magic.
The production is dedicated to Gianandrea Gavazzeni on the thirtieth anniversary of his death and on the sixtieth anniversary of his Nabucco, on 7 December 1966, with Elena Souliotis (Abigaille), Giangiacomo Guelfi (Nabucco), Gianni Raimondi (Ismaele) and Nicolai Ghiaurov (Zaccaria).
Nabucodonosor will be streamed live on LaScala.Tv on 29 May from 19.45. After the live broadcast, the video will remain available on demand until 5 June 2026.
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.
