Viva Verdi! Viva Verdi!

Attila storms City Opera, new Traviata bows at the Met

Even a genius needs practice to bring his talent into full flower. Beethoven, for example, had to get two fairly conventional symphonies under his belt before he revolutionized the form in the Eroica. Wagner, the creator of the German music-drama, required four false starts before he produced The Flying Dutchman. Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest of Italian opera composers, was no exception. Before Rigoletto, his first masterpiece, there came 16 other works, most of which have languished in obscurity for years.

No longer. The Verdi revival of the past decade has focused on the early operas; all but three are now available on records, and enterprising opera companies are putting works like Oberto and Giovanna d'Arco on the stage. At the New York City Opera, Attila has taken the State Theater in a blaze of barbaric splendor: the composer's ninth opera, it stands revealed as an uneven but vivid work. Those with more traditional tastes in Verdi could go across Lincoln Center to the Metropolitan Opera, which last week introduced a handsome new production by Tanya Moiseiwitsch of La Traviata.

Attila is one of Verdi's patriotic operas. Set in A.D. 452, when the Huns were at the gates of Rome, it was wildly successful at its 1846 premiere in Venice. A line in the prologue inflamed the imagination of a people yearning for national unification: "You can have the universe," sings Ezio, a Roman general, to Attila, "but leave Italy to me." In Risorgimento Italy, these were fighting words, and audiences recognized them as such.

The score has two powerful moments that foreshadow the composer's mature style. The first comes in the opening, when the heroine Odabella (Soprano Marilyn Zschau) confronts Attila (Bass Samuel Ramey), who has just killed her father and razed her city, Aquileia. In a fiery aria laced with coloratura, she swears vengeance. Around her a chorus of barbarians praises Attila's conquests. The scene is an early example of the art of dramatic juxtaposition perfected at the end of the third act of Otello, with lago gloating over his fallen master as the Venetians outside sing the Moor's praises.

The second occurs at the close of the first act. An old man appears to Attila in a dream, barring the Hun's way to Rome. "You are appointed as scourge only against mankind," he tells him, in tones that forecast the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos. "This is the territory of the gods." When Attila encounters the man--historically, Pope Leo I--in the flesh, he hears the same words, set to the same melody, which Verdi has also used in that scene to raise the curtain on Attila's uneasy slumber. The act ends with a majestic chorus in which the Italians sing of their coming triumph while Attila prostrates himself in fear. Although the rest of the opera is largely conventional, these two episodes make Attila well worth reviving.

Ramey's lithe, athletic figure and rich, commanding voice dominated the action; the fine bass, one of the company's rising stars, was every inch the barbaric chieftain. Zschau electrified the opening-night audience with her first aria, but her big soprano is still not fully under control. Sergiu Comissiona conducted with a sure sense of pacing, pushing the big scenes and relaxing in the more lyrical moments, although his tendency to cut off phrase endings was as ruthless as if he were Attila cutting off heads. The production, with bold costumes by Hal George--perhaps the best single element--has already been seen in Chicago and travels to San Diego in 1984.

The best thing about the Met's new Traviata is Colin Graham's direction, full of sensible details: a nervous, bumptious Alfredo (Tenor Placido Domingo) being encouraged to sing his first-act brindisi; the guests at Violetta's party peeking through curtains as their hostess (Soprano Ileana Cotrubas) and Alfredo gaze lovingly into each other's eyes; the elder Germont (Baritone Cornell MacNeil) arriving uninvited at the home of Flora (Ariel Bybee) in his street clothes--not, as he is usually seen, in formal evening wear.

Cotrubas sang beautifully, and wisely avoided any interpolated leaps into the stratosphere at the end of Sempre libera. Yet Violetta is not Mimi; she needs more dramatic backbone. Domingo, the most versatile tenor in Italian opera today, was in top form as Alfredo, but even the modest demands of Germont are now beyond Veteran MacNeil.

It remains to be seen whether works like Attila will join warhorses like Traviata in the repertory. Probably they will not: of the operas that precede Rigoletto, the Met, for example, has staged only four. But it is important to hear these pieces if the repertory is not to become stultified. To understand how Verdi arrived at his great flourishes of genius like Don Carlos and Otello, it helps to know where he came from. qed

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