An opera long absent from the Campo San Fantin stage returns for a new staging.
Giuseppe Verdi’s Attila is back on stage at the Fenice Theatre, the same theatre it premiered in 1846. This is, indeed, Verdi’s most ‘Venetian’ opera because it opens with refugees the Huns forced out of the city of Aquileia and then finding a new home in the Venetian Lagoon. The story was adapted into a drama in 1809, and then into opera by Francesco Maria Piave. The Huns invaded northeastern Italy under their king Attila in 451 to loot what was left of the Western Roman Empire. They marauded and destroyed the ancient glorious cities of Aquileia, Altino, and Concordia until Pope Leo was able to stop them. So much for the historical background. The opera’s plot spans three acts and rests heavily on male characters’ monologues: Ezio’s epic cabalettas, Leo’s grandiose invocation to fatherland and God’s will, Attila’s gloomy brooding to the point of delirium.
In subject and decadent Medieval setting, to begin with, the opera is exquisitely Romantic, penned by an unabashedly Romantic poet and put in music by a composer that incarnated Romanticism in Italy. The height of the action is the assassination of the tyrant under a story arch that touches the epic. Odabella is a novel Judith; the sad state of the fatherland is repeatedly evoked with lacerating calls, especially in the prologue and in the end of the third act. Back when the opera premiered, we can take for granted that these were taken as patriotic innuendos in the mind of the audience. The Attila is less famous than other operas by Verdi, and maybe the least impressive from a musical point of view, considering the production of the young Verdi. It baffled contemporaries, and later critics were no more understanding. Nevertheless, it is hard not to appreciate majestic scenes and the monumentality of drama, especially in the ensemble moments.
