Playing God, again

25 April 2006

History would have it that Verdi’s early opera Nabucco is an allegory of Risorgimento politics and the struggle towards the reunification of Italy. Verdi’s more immediate struggle was with censorship, an issue he encountered throughout his life. Nabucco was his first ‘hit’ and the opera that opened theatre doors for him outside Italy. Unfortunately for Verdi and his librettist Temistocle Solera, this meant dealing with restrictions where, in England particularly, biblical subjects were forbidden on the stage. The Lord Chamberlain’s office was especially virulent over the ‘Old Testament opera permitted in Catholic countries’, according to the eminent music critic Henry Chorley, and an opera like Nabucco, he explains, ‘must here be re-baptised for we English are not so hard, or soft, as to be willing to see the personages of Holy Writ acted and sung in theatres. Hagar in the wilderness, Ruth gleaning among the “alien corn”, Herodias with the head of John the Baptist in the charger, are subjects of personal exhibition which all thoughtful lovers of art in music must reject, on every principle of reverence and of taste, and from which the thoughtless would recoil, because, perhaps, they are not so amusing as La Traviata.’ The character closest to biblical identity is the priest Zaccaria who resembles Jeremiah, so Nabucco was rechristened Nino, Re d’Assyria for London in 1846 with all the characters renamed, Zaccaria becoming the High Priest of Isis and the exiled Hebrews renationalised as Babylonians. This Nino guise was how the opera received its Australian première in 1860. As a further precaution against offending the sensibilities of the Church of England’s colonial flock, it was decided that, ‘a sacred subject for the purpose of an opera being justly obnoxious to most people, the incidents were ultimately ascribed to Ninus, asserted by Diodorus to have been the first king of Assyria’. Confusion reigned as the audience grappled with the characters’ names and real identities to the extent that one correspondent opined that the audience would call in vain upon its recollections of student history to sort out the plot, which was an ‘incongruous amalgamation of incidents, and the jumbling together of epochs and empires, which even the license allowed to the lyric drama will scarcely justify’. By the end of the century Nabucco had been overshadowed by Verdi’s mature operas, and with its rehabilitation in the 20th century, its plot, concerning the exile and near massacre of

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Playing God, again

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