A new staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Attila makes its debut at the Teatro La Fenice: the staging of the Busseto-born composer’s ninth opera-the second, in chronological order, of the five composed for the Venetian theater-bears the signature of director Leo Muscato, with sets by Federica Parolini, costumes by Silvia Aymonino and light design by Alessandro Verazzi: this production will also aspire to enter the ranks of the Venetian theater’s ‘stable’ repertoire. The musical interpretation will be entrusted to Sebastiano Rolli, one of Verdi’s most promising and talented conductors, who will lead a cast composed for the main characters of Michele Pertusi, Anastasia Bartoli and Antonio Poli.
An operatic drama in a prologue and three acts, with a libretto by Temistocle Solera and Francesco Maria Piave based on the tragedy Attila, König der Hunnen (Attila, King of the Huns, 1808) by German poet Zacharias Werner, Attila made its debut at La Fenice on March 17, 1846, and soon entered the repertoire as an emblem of the so-called ‘patriotic opera. This new revival of Verdi’s Attila will thus enable Teatro La Fenice to retrace a stage in its own history, and for Venetians themselves to reflect on the origins and history of their lagoon city. Indeed, in the prologue of Attila, set in the fifth century A.D., there is a story of the arrival of the Aquileians who escaped the ‘scourge of God’ on the shores of Rio-Alto, in the “Adriatic Lagoons”: this is the ‘mythical’ story of the founding of Venice, only recently disproved by archaeologists. Of course, the discovery of the ‘historical forgery’ on which Attila is based does not detract from the value of Verdi’s title: we know for certain, in fact, that what Verdi was passionate about was not the historiographical veracity of the story told, but rather the plausibility of the historical image re-enacted on stage, in the direction of a visual realism that is the ever-increasingly unavoidable instance of the theater of that period.
