Verdi: Nabucco (Highlights)by Anonymous

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October 20, 2006: The brilliance of this opera demonstrates how early Verdi established his basic style. The same was hardly true of Wagner, whose Flying Dutchman differs greatly from his mature work. Verdi added dramatic muscle to lyrical Bellini and dignity to the brilliant "hacks" Rossini and Donizetti. The only trend I notice in Verdi's development is that he keeps getting generally better from Nabucco to La Forza del Destino. Although his style remains the same, his operas are all quite distinct and wide-ranging in setting and theme. He understood the literary foundation of opera, basing three operas, for example, on Shakespeare, whose European reputation had soared upward early in the 19th century. The biblical setting of Nabucco calls to mind Saint-Saen's Samson et Dalila but the music is more virile, reversing Lord Chesterfield's generalization about the virile French and feminine Italian languages. Verdi makes other latter 19th century composers sound decadent by comparison. The more I listen to Verdi the less interested I become in Puccini. Along with Wagner, Verdi is the culmination of operatic history. In the 20th century, opera was quickly supplanted by films. It is no wonder that the majority of customer reviewers concentrate on new performances rather than on the operas themselves. Except for performance, opera has simply not progressed much since Verdi and Wagner and there is nothing wrong with that. Progress is not the chief element in cultural history. Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle is a great work and Britten's Peter Grimes a good one but the success of these two works lies chiefly in their instrumental music. Verdi's long career ended in the 1890s just as film history was beginning in France.