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A Babylon That Never Was: Stefano Poda’s Nabucco Verona
Arena
06/26/2026 - & July 4, 12, 18, 23, August 1, 8*, 20, 28, September 9, 2026
Giuseppe Verdi: Nabucco
Amartuvshin Enkhbat/Youngjun Park*/Ludovic Tézier (Nabucco), Riccardo Rados*/Samuele Simoncini (Ismaele), Roberto Tagliavini/Simon Lim/Aleksander Vinogradov*/Michele Pertusi (Zaccaria),María José Siri/Olga Maslova/ Marta Torbidoni* (Abigaille), Annalisa Stroppa/Anna Werle*/Irene Savignano (Fenena), Nicolò Ceriani/Gabriele Sagona* (Gran Sacerdote di Belo), Carlo Bosi/Riccardo Rados/ Matteo Macchioni* (Abdallo), Elena Borin/Elisabetta Zizzo* (Anna)
Coro dell’Arena di Verona, Ulisse Trabacchin (chorus master), Orchestra dell’Arena di Verona, Michele Spotti*/Sebastiano Rolli (conductor)
Stefano Poda (stage director, sets, costumes, lights, costumes), Paolo Giani Cei (assistant director, lights, costumes)
(© Ennevi Foto)
The Arena di Verona has never been an entirely neutral space for opera. Its vast elliptical architecture rewards works capable of translating musical grandeur into visual scale, which explains the perennial success of Aida, Turandot and Nabucco. Verdi’s third opera arrived at the Arena with almost everything required for an open‑air spectacular: armies, processions, religious ceremonies, massed populations, political upheaval and a chorus whose famous hymn has long possessed the capacity to bring an audience of thousands to collective silence.
Yet an opera is not made monumental merely by making everything around it enormous. Stefano Poda’s Nabucco, revived here after its 2025 première, provided a salutary demonstration of the distinction between spectacle and theatrical meaning. The evening was lavish, meticulously engineered and often undeniably beautiful. It was also so conceptually remote from Verdi’s drama that the question eventually became unavoidable: why was this elaborate visual apparatus being attached to Nabucco in the first place?
Poda had assumed an unusually comprehensive authorship of the production, serving as director, set and costume designer, lighting designer and choreographer. The resulting unity of style was unmistakable. The Arena became an enormous abstract landscape populated by monumental structures, metallic surfaces, illuminated garments, dancers, soldiers and apparently limitless choruses of extras. Huge hemispherical forms altered the configuration of the stage; an enormous transparent hourglass hovered above it, proclaiming VANITAS; an imposing staircase bore the Latin motto Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
The difficulty was that these images belonged much more readily to Poda’s personal aesthetic vocabulary than to Verdi’s theatrical universe. There is nothing inherently objectionable about transporting Nabucco away from literal antiquity. A director may legitimately regard Babylon and Jerusalem as metaphors rather than archaeological locations. What is required, however, is an alternative theatrical logic sufficiently persuasive to replace the original one. Poda supplied an aesthetic, but not a world.
The production suggested an indeterminate civilisation somewhere between futuristic dystopia, science‑fiction fantasy and an exceptionally expensive theme- “ark spectacle. Costumes glowed; structures opened and closed; dancers performed elaborate rituals; soldiers brandished weapons in stylised patterns; crowds formed and dissolved into geometrical configurations. One waited in vain for some visual or dramatic clue capable of establishing the nature of this society and its relationship to Verdi’s narrative.
There was consequently no persuasive Babylon, no recognisable Jerusalem and, more importantly, no substitute for either. This was not merely a question of scenery. Nabucco is an opera whose dramatic vocabulary is inseparable from questions of political and spiritual authority. Nabucco’s arrogance is not simply that of a generic authoritarian ruler; his confrontation with the Hebrew God constitutes the essential theological axis of the drama. His humiliation therefore cannot be reduced to the downfall of a political strongman. It is a metaphysical chastening, a recognition that earthly sovereignty is finite.
Poda’s staging weakened precisely this dimension. The visual world was resolutely secular, abstract and futuristic, while the religious conflict remained largely unintegrated into the stage language. The result was a peculiar form of aesthetic dislocation: the characters continued to sing Verdi’s text, but the production offered few visual or dramatic circumstances in which that text could acquire its full significance.
One could admire the production’s surfaces while remaining unable to believe in its premise. The problem became particularly acute whenever the stage was filled with masses of identically costumed figures. Poda had an obvious understanding of the Arena’s acoustical and visual challenges: small‑scale naturalism would have disappeared in such an environment. His solution, however, was almost invariably amplification. More dancers, more soldiers, more extras, more movement, more architectural intervention. The stage was rarely permitted the luxury of emptiness. Yet emptiness can be dramatically eloquent.
The great moments of Nabucco depend upon precisely that contraction. Abigaille’s recollection of lost innocence in “Anch’io dischiuso un giorno” requires the audience to encounter a solitary consciousness rather than another monumental tableau. Nabucco’s collapse in the fourth act is compelling because the mighty conqueror is reduced to an individual confronted by his own vulnerability. “Va, pensiero” derives much of its extraordinary effect from the transformation of a chorus into a single collective voice.
Poda’s production too often responded to such moments by enlarging them visually when it should have concentrated them emotionally.
The choreography was frequently impressive in its precision. It was also frequently beside the point. Bodies moved in disciplined patterns, assembled into triangles and lines, marched, knelt and dispersed with an efficiency that would have done credit to a military pageant. But choreography is not automatically dramaturgy. After a while, the recurrent movement began to seem less like an interpretation of the score than a nervous refusal to allow anything simply to remain still.
The Arena was consequently treated as though it were a problem that had to be solved afresh every few minutes. Some images worked. The enclosed structures containing the Hebrews communicated confinement with immediate visual economy. The arrangement of the first‑act ensemble, with Nabucco commanding the centre of a huge human formation, effectively represented the hierarchy of power. These were moments when Poda’s immense resources served Verdi rather than competing with him.
Other sequences seemed to have been conceived principally because the Arena could accommodate them. The swordplay was particularly symptomatic. The warriors executed beautifully synchronised movements whose geometrical elegance rendered the violence almost entirely abstract. One admired the physical discipline while wondering what relationship it bore to the dramatic situation. The Arena had become the setting for a spectacular choreography of armed bodies rather than a place in which an actual conflict appeared to be occurring.
The visual excess also diminished the principals. With the stage so frequently populated by identically stylised figures, it was not always easy to identify the protagonists within the mass. This was a serious dramaturgical weakness. Verdi’s opera depended upon sharply defined relationships: Abigaille’s hatred of Fenena, her rivalry with Nabucco, Ismaele’s divided loyalties, Zaccaria’s religious authority and Nabucco’s struggle against forces larger than himself. If the visual language made everyone appear part of the same monumental organism, the human conflicts became secondary to the design. At its worst, Poda’s Nabucco seemed to be asking the audience to admire its production values rather than to experience its drama.
The musical performance was fortunately much more disciplined. Michele Spotti conducted with a commendable sense of proportion. He avoided the crude temptation to make early Verdi sound permanently bombastic, allowing the score’s lyrical contours and instrumental detail to emerge alongside its theatrical propulsion. The orchestral climaxes possessed weight without degenerating into noise, and the tempi generally retained forward momentum without making the music breathless.
The Orchestra of the Fondazione Arena played with admirable cohesion, while Roberto Gabbiani’s chorus provided some of the evening’s most compelling musical moments. “Va, pensiero” was sung with sonorous concentration and commendable textual clarity. Most importantly, the chorus did not appear to require the visual assistance with which Poda surrounded it. Verdi’s music had already supplied everything necessary: exile, memory, longing and the fantasy of freedom.
Indeed, “Va, pensiero” exposed the production’s central misconception. The chorus did not become more moving because it was surrounded by elaborate stage pictures. It became more moving when those pictures ceased to matter.
Marta Torbidoni was the evening’s outstanding singer. Having made a strong impression as Lady Macbeth in Macerata, she confronted Abigaille with a combination of vocal stamina and dramatic commitment that was particularly welcome in so unforgiving a role. The part demanded a punishing synthesis of power, agility, register extension and sustained intensity, and Torbidoni negotiated its demands with impressive determination.
More important was her ability to suggest that Abigaille was not merely a vocal monster manufactured for the purpose of early‑Verdi excitement. Her “Anch’io dischiuso un giorno” allowed a glimpse of the woman buried beneath the character’s violence. The controlled softness of her singing gave the aria a melancholy that contrasted tellingly with the more aggressive passages. There were signs of fatigue in the lower register, and the voice did not always have the terrifying visceral quality of the greatest Abigailles, but Torbidoni remained the cast member who most consistently generated genuine dramatic interest.
Francesco Meli was equally distinguished in the considerably less rewarding part of Ismaele. The role did not offer the obvious vocal opportunities afforded to Abigaille or Nabucco, but Meli brought his customary polish to every phrase. His tenor retained its characteristic warmth and focus, while his intelligent phrasing gave Ismaele an emotional complexity that the production did little to encourage. His character existed at the intersection of private love and collective catastrophe, and Meli conveyed that tension with dignity and considerable vocal refinement. Some upper-register fatigue was perceptible, but his performance remained one of the evening’s principal strengths.
Youngjun Park in the title role presented a more problematic proposition. The baritone sang with a pleasant, well‑supported voice that carried adequately through the Arena, but vocal adequacy was not enough to establish the character. Nabucco needed to arrive as a sovereign whose political and personal authority seemed overwhelming. Instead, the singer’s stage presence remained strangely avuncular. There was little of the regality, menace or imperiousness that should have made the character’s subsequent humiliation dramatically consequential.
This was particularly damaging in the fourth act. The psychological trajectory from “Son pur queste mie membra!” to “Dio di Giuda!” represented the central transformation of the opera: the conqueror discovered himself to be mortal, powerless and finally dependent upon a divine authority greater than his own. Such a transformation required a commanding presence at the outset. Without sufficient majesty in the first half, there was less for Verdi to dismantle later. The singer’s more restrained moments therefore had a certain humanity, but they did not quite complete the dramatic arc.
Aleksander Vinogradov gave Zaccaria a sonorous, rounded bass and considerable vocal authority. Unfortunately, his diction was frequently inadequate. In a role so dependent upon declamation, rhetoric and religious proclamation, insufficient textual clarity was a significant liability. Anna Werle offered Fenena a warm mezzo and attractive legato, while Gabriele Sagona supplied an appropriately stern Grand Priest of Belo. The remaining supporting cast fulfilled its duties competently.
The musical virtues made the staging’s shortcomings all the more apparent. When Spotti allowed Verdi’s orchestration to establish the dramatic atmosphere, the opera suddenly required remarkably little visual supplementation. When Torbidoni gave Abigaille an interior life, she needed no elaborate machinery to become compelling. When Meli phrased Ismaele with emotional intelligence, the character acquired a human dimension that Poda’s visual conception had largely suppressed.
One began to suspect that the most effective direction of the evening was coming from the score itself. This was particularly ironic because Poda clearly possessed the technical gifts required to create extraordinary theatre in the Arena. His handling of the enormous space was never amateurish. The stage pictures were carefully calculated, the choreography was disciplined and the visual vocabulary was consistent. The problem lay deeper. The production had been conceived with such complete confidence in its own aesthetic identity that Verdi’s dramatic world seemed almost incidental to it. It was possible to imagine the production with another score. That was the ultimate indictment.
The spectacle would have remained recognisable. The geometric masses, luminous costumes, monumental architecture, sword choreography and hourglass would still have functioned. But Nabucco could not be so easily exchanged for another opera without revealing how little of its specific dramaturgy had informed the conception.
A successful reinterpretation does not merely place an old opera inside a new visual environment. It discovers what remains essential when the historical surface has been removed. Poda’s production removed the surface but did not sufficiently recover the essence.
What remained was an evening of considerable entertainment value and formidable visual accomplishment. There were memorable images, impressive crowd scenes and moments of genuine theatrical grandeur. But the cumulative effect was curiously hollow. The production seemed to have mistaken magnitude for meaning, activity for dramatic tension and visual invention for interpretation.
The Arena had supplied Poda with almost unlimited space, and he had responded by filling it. Verdi had supplied him with something more difficult: a drama about the limits of power. That was the lesson the production never quite absorbed.
For all the elaborate machinery, Nabucco had ultimately been most powerful when the monumental world contracted into a human voice: Abigaille remembering what she had lost, Ismaele divided between love and loyalty, the Hebrews dreaming of home, or Nabucco himself discovering that a king could become a supplicant. Those moments belonged to Verdi, not to the machinery. And when the machinery finally receded, the opera survived magnificently.
Ossama el Naggar
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