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Verdi’s Unfulfilled Encounter with Voltaire Parma
Teatro Regio
10/01/2026 - & October 8, 17*, 2026
Giuseppe Verdi : Alzira
Marta Torbidoni (Alzira), Antonio Poli (Zamoro), Daniel Luis de Vicente (Gusmano), Alessio Cacciamano (Alvaro), Agostino Subacchi (Ataliba), Erica Cortese (Zuma), Long Ning (Otumbo), Federico Bonghi (Ovando)
Coro del Teatro Regio di Parma, Martino Faggiani (Chorus Master), Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini, James Conlon (Conductor)
Manuel Renga (Stage Director), Aurelio Colombo (Sets & Costumes), Emanuele Agliati (Lighting), Paola Lattanzi (Choreography)
(© Roberto Ricci/Festival Verdi)
There are few operas whose reputations have been so effectively reduced to a single sentence attributed to their composer. Verdi’s “questa è proprio brutta” has followed Alzira (1845) through its sparse performance history, providing a convenient epitaph for his eighth opera. The verdict was hardly inexplicable. Written between Ernani (1844) and Macbeth (1847), it belonged to a period in which Verdi was rapidly consolidating his dramatic language, yet it lacked the coherence and force that distinguished the works on either side of it. The Parma revival, conducted by James Conlon and staged by Manuel Renga, nevertheless demonstrated that the score was not without resources. Its deficiencies were more conspicuous in the construction of the drama than in the invention of the music.
The choice of Voltaire as a source was, in principle, promising. Alzire, ou les Américains, first performed in 1736, placed the violence of Spanish conquest in the context of an Enlightenment examination of religious intolerance, colonial authority and the possibility of moral regeneration. The confrontation between the conquistadors and the Indigenous Peruvians offered a subject whose political implications extended well beyond the conventional conflict between rival lovers. It also presented an opportunity to investigate the contradiction between Christian profession and colonial practice, between the language of civilisation and the exercise of domination.
Cammarano’s adaptation preserved the outline of this conflict while sacrificing much of its intellectual substance. The result was an opera that repeatedly approached a more ambitious drama without quite becoming one. The conquistador Gusmano’s rivalry with Zamoro for Alzira took precedence over the broader opposition between colonial power and resistance. The Indigenous characters were granted the moral position of the oppressed, but their collective experience was insufficiently developed to turn the setting into a convincing political world. Meanwhile, Alzira’s dilemma, potentially the most revealing aspect of the story, was narrowed to the familiar predicament of a woman whose fidelity and suffering determined the fate of two men.
This reduction was particularly unfortunate because Voltaire’s play offered a more complex framework for the final act. Gusmano’s conversion and forgiveness of Zamoro might have acquired genuine tragic significance had the opera prepared his transformation through an intelligible conflict between conviction, ambition and conscience. Instead, the dying governor’s sudden generosity appeared to resolve a contradiction that the drama had not adequately explored. The ending preserved the moral ideal of reconciliation while weakening the psychological process through which it was supposed to emerge. Voltaire’s own conclusion also embraced forgiveness, but the philosophical argument underpinning that resolution gave it a significance that Cammarano’s adaptation substantially attenuated. In the opera, reconciliation was less the culmination of a moral reckoning than an expedient conclusion to a conflict whose underlying contradictions remained insufficiently examined.
The libretto’s brevity compounded the difficulty. In approximately ninety minutes, it attempted to encompass conquest, political rebellion, romantic rivalry, paternal authority and religious reconciliation. Yet compression did not produce concentration. Important developments arrived abruptly, and the succession of conventional numbers sometimes interrupted rather than intensified the dramatic progression. Verdi’s gift for theatrical momentum was already evident, but the architecture remained uneven. One could recognise the outlines of concerns that would later occupy him more successfully without finding here their fully persuasive expression.
Renga’s staging sought to restore some of the philosophical and political dimension that the operatic adaptation had diminished, approaching the work through the lens of colonial history and its continuing implications. Rather than reducing Peru to a picturesque landscape for a European love story, he foregrounded the fundamental asymmetry between conquerors and conquered. This was a welcome corrective to the temptation to aestheticise colonial violence, although the director’s own treatment of Gusmano made the governor even more detestable and morally compromised than Cammarano’s libretto already suggested. Such an approach strengthened the indictment of Spanish domination, but it also rendered the final act’s sudden gesture of magnanimity more difficult to accept. The more emphatically Gusmano embodied the corruption of colonial power, the greater the dramatic burden placed upon his eventual conversion.
The production’s visual language was both purposeful and, at its best, strikingly elegant. A vast canvas depicting a scene from Hell, in the manner of the sixteenth-century Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder, served as a backdrop at various moments, evoking the suffering and torture inflicted upon the subjugated Incas. Its imagery lent the violence of conquest a disturbing historical resonance without resorting to picturesque exoticism.
Renga further complicated the historical perspective by dressing both Spaniards and Indigenous Peruvians en deux temps, juxtaposing the period represented in the opera with the nineteenth century in which it was composed. The natives appeared alternately in appealing, stylised Inca attire and in costumes evocative of the Mexican Revolution, while the Spaniards shifted between the dress of sixteenth-century courtiers and that of nineteenth-century aristocrats. Several paintings in the style of Spain’s Siglo de Oro adorned Gusmano’s quarters, reinforcing the aesthetic vocabulary of the conquering power. This deliberate superimposition of historical periods suggested that colonial domination was not merely an episode consigned to the past, but a structure of power whose ideological and social manifestations persisted across generations.
The conception possessed both elegance and purpose, and its political intentions were commendable. Yet the director’s determination to sustain a continuous visual commentary occasionally became excessive. The movement of performers, processional passages and supplementary gestures competed with the score for attention, diminishing the impact of moments that would have gained from stillness. The interpretation was intellectually defensible, but its theatrical expression was not always sufficiently selective. The production was strongest when the conflict emerged from the relationships among the principal characters, rather than from an accumulation of illustrative details. Its central paradox was that the more persuasive its indictment of colonial oppression became, the less credible Gusmano’s eventual redemption appeared.
Conlon, by contrast, offered a persuasive account of the music’s intrinsic virtues. He brought definition to its rhythmic patterns, attended carefully to orchestral colour and sustained the tension of the larger ensembles. The Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini responded with energy and precision, allowing the score’s melodic writing and dramatic accents to emerge with clarity. The music did not possess the architectural inevitability of Verdi’s mature achievements, but Conlon avoided treating it as a merely archaeological curiosity. His reading revealed the work of a composer whose theatrical instincts were already formidable, even when the dramatic material did not adequately reward them. Some passages, particularly those of a more delicate character, might have benefited from greater rhythmic flexibility; the broader trajectory, however, remained firmly controlled.
Marta Torbidoni dominated the stage through a combination of vocal amplitude, dramatic assurance and personal magnetism. She was unquestionably the production’s most charismatic singer, and her portrayal gave Alzira a force that the libretto itself scarcely provided. Yet the casting invited a distinction between the effectiveness of a performer and the suitability of her vocal profile. Torbidoni had recently sung Abigaille at the Arena di Verona and had appeared as Lady Macbeth in Macerata the previous summer. These roles offered an apt indication of her instrument: distinctly imposing, with the weight and projection of a spinto soprano, rather than the predominantly lyric voice traditionally associated with Alzira.
The discrepancy was not simply a matter of vocal volume. Alzira’s music calls for suppleness, a capacity for sustained lyrical expression and an emotional vulnerability that does not depend exclusively on dramatic weight. Torbidoni’s commanding presence gave the character unusual authority, but her substantial instrument could also shift the vocal balance away from the intimacy and pliancy that the role might profitably possess. Her interpretation was therefore compelling without being an entirely self-evident casting choice. The distinction was important precisely because her dramatic gifts were so apparent: the question was not whether she could command attention, but whether the part made the best use of her particular vocal qualities.
A rising tenor on the Italian opera scene, Antonio Poli’s Zamoro offered a contrasting profile. I first heard him as Manrico in Il Trovatore in Venice in 2022 and more recently as Macduff in the aforementioned Macerata Macbeth. Poli’s ringing tenor, ardent phrasing and intelligible diction served the character’s romantic and rebellious impulses well. He supplied the performance with an immediate emotional appeal, even where the writing left little room for psychological complication.
Daniel Luis de Vicente brought considerable vocal authority to Gusmano, although his forceful approach occasionally favoured sonority over nuance. The final reconciliation, already insufficiently prepared by the libretto and rendered still more problematic by Renga’s unrelenting characterisation, demanded a gradual transition towards vulnerability that the performance did not entirely supply. Greater subtlety and psychological differentiation might have lent the governor’s final act of forgiveness a measure of credibility, even if the fundamental dramaturgical difficulty remained. Alessio Cacciamani and the supporting cast contributed to an effective collective performance, while the chorus helped sustain the work’s public and political dimension.
What ultimately distinguished the Parma revival was the tension between the promise of the subject and the limitations of its realisation. Verdi’s music was often conventional, but its melodic immediacy and theatrical energy made the opera worth hearing. The more serious obstacle was Cammarano’s failure to preserve the philosophical argument of Voltaire’s play while constructing an equally compelling operatic drama in its place. The work consequently retained the vocabulary of moral tragedy without fully developing its intellectual or psychological consequences.
A more mature Verdi might have made considerably more of this material. The conflicts between political authority and private conscience, between paternal obligation and moral responsibility, and between religious profession and human conduct would later find richer expression in his operatic world. In Alzira, they remained suggestive possibilities rather than fully realised dramatic structures.
Conlon and the cast justified the revival, and Torbidoni in particular supplied it with a memorable theatrical centre. Renga’s production restored some of the urgency that the libretto had attenuated, although its visual insistence occasionally worked against its own purpose. Parma did not overturn the received judgment of Alzira, nor did it need to. Its more valuable achievement was to expose the distinction between a score of genuine, if limited, musical interest and a drama whose source had been diminished in adaptation. The opera remained a flawed work, but one whose shortcomings were worth examining rather than merely repeating Verdi’s verdict upon.
Ossama el Naggar
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