At the Berlin Staatsoper

When Verdi’s Nabucco was first performed in 1842, Milanese audiences were quick to see their own situation under Austrian occupation reflected in the plot, a loose adaptation of the Biblical story of the madness of Nebuchadnezzar and the plight of the exiled Judeans in Babylon. The chorus ‘Va pensiero’ became a rallying cry for Italian independence. ‘Oh my country,’ the Hebrew slaves sing, ‘so beloved and so lost.’ One conductor was threatened with arrest by Milan’s police commissioner ‘for having given to Verdi’s music an expression too evidently rebellious and hostile to the imperial government’. Six years later, when northern Italians rose up against Austrian rule in the revolutions of 1848, Verdi hailed the rebels as heroes.

‘Va pensiero’ is still an unofficial anthem for national self-determination. ‘Every time I sing this chorus, I get goosebumps,’ a mezzo-soprano in the Lviv National Opera’s chorus told me when I saw Nabucco there this summer. ‘We sing it with faith in our victory.’

Nabucco opens the new season at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden (until 26 October), the first time the company has performed the opera in more than sixty years. During his three decades as musical director before he stepped down in 2023, Daniel Barenboim conducted Aida, Otello, La Traviata, Simon Boccanegra, Il Trovatore, Macbeth and Falstaff, but never Nabucco – though if he had, he would surely have seen it as a chance to reflect on the opera’s themes of genocide, exile, resistance and the corruption of absolute power in our own time. Barenboim, who established the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with his friend Edward Said to bring together young musicians from Israel and Palestine, has written extensively on the relationship between music and politics.

His successor at the Berlin Staatsoper, Christian Thielemann, has, by contrast, maintained across decades of interviews that music is not political, and politics is irrelevant to the work he conducts. As he once put it, ‘what has C sharp minor to do with fascism? Nothing.’ This has not prevented him from expressing political opinions. In 2015, he wrote in Die Zeit that the far-right Pegida movement was entitled to protest against the arrival of refugees, and questioned Angela Merkel’s statement that ‘Islam belongs in Germany.’ ‘Tolerance is important,’ Thielemann told one interviewer, ‘but in the Prussian sense. Namely, accepting that others may enjoy their freedom only to the extent that it comes up against someone else’s.’ His extensive collection of art and artefacts from the Prussian Empire includes at least one piece on permanent loan to the Otto von Bismarck Foundation.

Thielemann isn’t conducting this run of Nabucco, but it is the opening salvo for his first season at the Staatsoper, which he programmed with the company’s new artistic director, Elisabeth Sobotka. In May, Sobotka said that a ‘common thread’ of the programme was ‘Beware simple truths’ (‘Hüten wir uns vor einfachen Wahrheiten’).

At first glance, this seems like a statement that Verdi could get behind. His operas often served as political parables, but they also chronicle the complicated business of being human, and many of his heroes and antiheroes don’t fit a stereotypical mould. Nabucco is a ruler so hell-bent on power that he declares himself god, but by the end of the opera he has realised his humility and humanity through dramaturgical and musical transformation. It’s one thing to beware simplification, though; quite another to beware the truth, simple or otherwise.

The Italian director, Emma Dante, acknowledges in an interview for the Staatsoper’s programme booklet that ‘both Germany and Italy are countries that have been involved in conflicts and wars’, but she also stresses that she wanted to avoid anything resembling a documentary with her staging: ‘The current conflicts are much too complex to represent in an opera.’

One complexity is that the production stars Anna Netrebko as Abigaille, Nabucco’s genocidal and megalomaniac daughter. The Russian soprano was dropped from many performance schedules in 2022 because of her previous support for Putin and her initial reluctance to distance herself from him following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Both of her performances at the Staatsoper since she was invited back (as Abigaille and Lady Macbeth) have been met with protests. (Full disclosure: I worked with Netrebko in the mid-2010s when I was employed by her US digital media firm.)

Dante stages the work abstractly, almost haphazardly. The costumes are a mix of exaggerated period pieces and contemporary dress. The set, which represents both the Temple in Jerusalem and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, is modelled after Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel at Hudson Yards in New York, a structure that was closed for several years after four people used it as a place to kill themselves, but also one that reminded Dante of a honeycomb. The Judeans in Verdi’s opera, she says, were ‘a people that is extraordinarily industrious, a people able to create something of value’ – the sort of problematically philosemitic rhetoric that’s seemingly part of Germany’s reason of state.

Yet there are moments that could have come straight out of a bleak night of doomscrolling. Non-singing actors playing invading Babylonians steal the black wool coats off the backs of the Judeans and turn them inside out to reveal crimson silk linings. Whatever the intention may have been, I was immediately reminded of the widely circulated photo of Israeli soldiers in Gaza posing with the red slip of a Palestinian woman they had either killed or displaced, one of countless such images shared online by IDF personnel.

Dante’s staging of ‘Va pensiero’ begins with another group of extras, in flowing flower-print dresses, holding the body of a young girl – a Pietà by way of the Esprit catalogue. A man gently pries the corpse from its mother’s arms, covers it with his own coat and carries it offstage. He brings the body back onstage a few moments later, after the girl’s mother has also collapsed in death, to wrap both of them in white shrouds.

Perhaps this would have been effective had it come in a production that was trying to grapple with the parallels between the politics of Nabucco and the politics of our time; at the very least, from a director who was willing to say something more specific about those parallels than ‘what is happening today’.

The production does however hold up a mirror to a city where politicians continue to dispute the veracity – the simple truth – of videos, photos, eyewitness testimony and other forms of meticulously documented evidence that have come out of Gaza in the last year. Just hours after I watched footage of a person burning alive after yet another Israeli attack on al-Aqsa Hospital last week, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry told a Berlin press briefing: ‘We see no signs that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.’

‘The most important thing is that the people who watch and listen to Nabucco feel the pain and the suffering that war causes and feel responsibility,’ Dante has said. Yet that responsibility is hard to feel when the political causes of war aren’t also brought into focus. After a morally reconciled Nabucco told the chorus of freed exiles, ‘Israel, return to your happy homeland,’ the man sitting behind me enthusiastically applauded.