Nabucco

Teatro alla Scala’s NABUCCO
Giuseppe Verdi | Opera in Four Acts
Sung in Italian | Estimated runtime 160 minutes including one intermission
Performed at Teatro alla Scala, Milan

Verdi’s Nabucco is an opera of biblical majesty, containing some of the greatest choral music ever
composed. The plot is based on the story of the Babylonian emperor Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar), the
captivity of the Jews under his rule, his struggle against his loved ones, his divine punishment and final
salvation. The themes of spirituality, love, sacred death, and redemption inspire a performance starring
Leo Nucci, one of the world’s greatest Verdi baritones, in the title role.

CAST
Nabucco: Leo Nucci
Ismaele: Aleksandrs Antonenko
Zaccaria: Vitalij Kowaljow
Abigaille: Liudmyla Monastyrska
Fenena: Veronica Simeoni
Abdallo: Giuseppe Veneziano
Anna:Tatyana Ryaguzova
Il gran Sacerdote: Ernesto Panariello
CREATIVE
Conductor: Nicola Luisotti
Staging: Daniele Abbado
Sets and costumes: Alison Chitty
Lights: Alessandro Carletti
Choreographic movements: Simona Bucci
Video: Luca Scarzella
Staging assistant: Boris Stetka
Performed on February 13, 2013
Notes:
The opera of "Va’ pensiero" brought Verdi, not yet thirty, an international success which stretched from
Europe to America. The protagonist Leo Nucci guides a company of singers that is necessarily hardened,
given the subject at hand. The new international production conceived by director Daniele Abbado is told
on a two-fold narrative level, in which the destiny of the present overlaps with memory.
The conventional love story, less significant in this work with of a sense of terror, of elementary
psychology, of instinctive primordiality, remains in the background. The themes of spirituality, love,
sacred death, and redemption are the main motifs that inspire the performance, in which the portrait of
the doubtful tyrant is sketched by the composer’s Verdi’s heated musical score.