Alzira

Verdi was not proud of this opera, and this production wouldn't have changed his mind!
At the risk of being proclaimed a heretic by opera lovers in general and Verdi afficonados in particular, I have to declare that this work by the great Italian maestro has to be his worst; well, if we were to rank his 28 operas, one of them has to be at the bottom - this is it! Surprising, because when it was originally produced in 1845, Verdi had already mounted 8 operas, including the far-superior "Nabucco", so, one would think that he was progressing steadily - and he was, because a few years later he produced a trilogy of great operas ("Rigoletto", "Il Trovatore", and "La Traviata"); there is no way, whether storywise or musically, to disguise the fact that with "Alzira", the reknowned composer hit the proverbial bump in the road to musical immortality - and he himself knew it when he called it "ugly". To the credit of the Teatro di Parma back in 1991, they courageously mounted a production of this rarely-performed work, but...





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