Sunday Classics: Great choruses (and more) from Verdi's "Nabucco," "Il Trovatore," and "Aida"

All those choral scenes and the rough-and-tumble action have made Nabucco a favorite at the outdoor Arena di Verona. Here Anton Guadagno conducts the great Act III chorus "Va, pensiero" in August 1992.

by Ken

Anyone who's dipped into either Friday night's preview or last night's knows that we're talking about three Verdi operas that they "happen" to be seminal operas in the three basic creative periods of the composer's career:

* Nabucco (1841) was Verdi's breakthrough opera, his first success after two flops. For all its unevennesses and crudities, it also qualifies, it seems to me, as his first masterpiece.

* Il Trovatore (1853), as we've noted is the middle opera of a trio composed over an extraordinary period of some two years which marked, rather explosively, the onset of Verdi's "middle" period.

* And Aida (1871), the opera for which Verdi allowed himself to be coaxed out of what he considered retirement, ushering in his "late" period, which includes the Requiem as well as the final operas, Otello and Falstaff.

I've been promising all this time to reveal what prompted me to link these operas, I've mentioned (more than once, I think) the fourth-side filler of the original LP issue of EMI's 1960 recording of Leoncavallo's I Paglicacci, made at La Scala under the direction of that keenly dramatic Croatian conductor Lovro von Matačić. All sorts of solutions were tried for fourth-side fillers for recordings of Pagliacci and its traditional companion piece, Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana. For this recording EMI, taking took advantage of having Italy's best orchestra and chorus at its disposal, recorded great choral scenes from three Verdi operas, the very three we've been poking at. I used to listen to the "filler" side all the time, especially to the third and longest excerpt, the Triumphal Scene from Aida.

Now that I'm having some success doing my own LP-to-MP3 dubs, one of the first things I thought of was those choruses, orphaned by the Paglacci recording's comfortable fit on a single CD. So we're going to hear all three choruses, as well as hearing once again the openers of these operas, and then we're going to add just a bit to our picture of the pieces.

By now you've probably guessed that the first chorus is "Va, pensiero" from Nabucco, and I just mentioned that the last is the Triumphal Scene from Aida. I'm guessing many of you can guess what the middle chorus is, but we'll get back to that in the click-through.


SAY, REMEMBER THAT AIDA "OVERTURE"
I PROMISED YOU WE WOULD HEAR TODAY?

No, not the wonderful little Prelude we've been listening to, which was in place at the time of the Cairo premiere in 1871, but the expanded full-scale overture Verdi wrote but chose not to have performed at the Italian premiere the following year. We'll hear it again and make some observations about it in the click-through, but here it is.

Aida: Overture (1872 version, withdrawn by the composer)
BBC Philharmonic, Sir Edward Downes, cond. Chandos, recorded July 18, 1999


TO HEAR OUR THREE VERDI CHORUSES, AND MORE
OF THE OPERAS THEY COME FROM, CLICK HERE.

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