Photo: Roberto Ricci

When Voltaire presented the Enlightenment drama Alzire, ou les Américains in Paris in 1736, he set in classically elegant alexandrine verse some of the politically tragic implications of Europe’s conquest of the indigenous peoples of America, represented by the rivalry between an Incan warrior and a Spanish conquistador for the same Peruvian woman. When Verdi took up the subject in Naples in 1845, in the spirit of operatic Romanticism, the peoples of Latin America had largely achieved independence in the revolutions inspired by Simón Bolívar during the 1820s, and the power of empires no longer appeared invincible; subject peoples no longer seemed hopelessly subjugated, and the struggle between the tenor Zamoro and the baritone Gusmano for the soprano Alzira was already shaped by a sense of modern nineteenth-century national antagonism. Though a hit for Voltaire, Alzira was one of Verdi’s least successful and, today still, one of his most neglected works. The new production at the Parma Verdi Festival this fall, conducted by James Conlon, made the case for this opera as a work that any Verdian would want to know, with his early genius on full display in a series of thrilling arias and especially in the magnificent ensemble finales of both acts.

The theme of the Parma festival this year was “mondi lontani” (distant worlds), and the operas all had settings outside Europe: Alzira in colonial Peru and Nabucco in ancient Babylon, both performed in the Parma Teatro Regio, and Aida in Old Kingdom Egypt performed in a miniature production in Verdi’s hometown Busseto. Furthermore, Conlon offered a gala concert on Verdi’s birthday, October 10, that included concert performances of the second act of Il Corsaro and the third act of Jérusalem. Both operas are rarely performed, and each of those acts presents a Christian assault on the Muslim world (specifically, its harems) in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Il Corsaro) and the Holy Land of the Crusades (Jérusalem).

Verdi’s imagined geography of the wider world was not, on the whole, about inventing idioms of musical exoticism, like the earlier alla turca style of Mozart’s Abduction in the 1780s or the later pentatonic “Chinese” aspects of Puccini’s Turandot in the 1920s. Verdi’s Babylonian and Egyptian characters tend to sing very much like his European characters, as do the Peruvians of Alzira. In fact, the politics of Verdian opera in the 1840s, the age of the “Giovine Italia” (Young Italy) movement for Italian unification and independence, meant that the choruses of Hebrews in Nabucco, of Scots in Macbeth, and likewise of Peruvians in Alzira, partly channeled the national sentiments of the Italian Risorgimento, aiming to emancipate those Italian provinces ruled by the Habsburg emperor in Vienna. The Verdi opera whose dramatic structure stands closest to Alzira of 1845 is Ernani of 1844, with the same rivalry between tenor and baritone for the soprano, with the tenor a political rebel against the imperial power of the baritone. In Ernani, the baritone is none other than the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, also king of Spain, while in Alzira the baritone is presumably the Spanish representative of Charles V in Peru. Verdi’s lifelong political antagonism and ambivalence toward the historical and contemporary Habsburgs (think Don Carlos) shaped his operatic conception even of “distant worlds” and made the Peruvians of Alzira into honorary Italians fighting for their homeland.

Following an overture that concludes in a military marching rhythm, allegro brillante, fortissimo, the curtain rises on a prologue in which the male chorus of Peruvians have taken an unfortunate Spanish prisoner. A brief orchestral introduction begins pianississimo (ppp), with an ensuing crescendo that finally has the chorus entering explosively on the words “Muoia, muoia” (let him die) as they prepare to execute their captive. Propelled forward in 6/8 time, the score is marked “tutti con accenti ferocissimo,” so that the accents fall with percussive ferocity, two to a measure, on both syllables of “muoia.” The libretto (by the Neapolitan Salvadore Cammarano) has the chorus calling savagely for “il tormento di mille tormenti,” the death of a thousand cuts. In fact, ferocity is the dominant spirit of this score, on both sides of the military encounter, and some Verdians might wish for more pathos and more expansive lyrical moments in an opera that offers relatively little relief to the emotional intensity of the struggle across a concentrated ninety minutes of music, Verdi’s shortest opera. That said, the music is hardly unvarying, and the chorus of “Muoia muoia” is suddenly transformed by a shift from G-minor to G-major and the introduction of an entirely new sentimental spirit, “O fratelli, caduti pugnando/ dalle tombe sorgete ululando,” (O brothers, who have fallen in fighting, rise lamenting from your tombs), set to a rolling melody over triplet accompaniment, still in 6/8 time. The chorus of the Teatro Regio made this shift of key and spirit into something magical, under Conlon’s baton and the choral direction of Martino Faggiani, as the Peruvians call on their fallen brothers to join them from the grave in a hymn of triumph, the sort of hymn that Italians, including Verdi, would compose for their own national Risorgimento.

The Peruvian tenor hero of the opera, Zamoro, sung with heroic tone and stirring fervor by Antonio Poli, makes his first dramatic appearance in the prologue to demand that his fellow Incans release the prisoner who is about to die the death of a thousand torments. “Return to your own people, old man,” he declaims, “and tell those who call us savages that a savage gave you your life.” Like Voltaire, Verdi and Cammarano were interested in the question of who the real “savages” were in the Spanish colonial encounter with the Incas. The old man will turn out to be Alvaro, the Spanish governor and the father of Zamoro’s enemy and rival, Gusmano.

Photo: Roberto Ricci

Zamoro’s opening aria, in syncopated ¾ time, sung over lyrical triplets, recalls his own cruel imprisonment by the Spaniards, when his spirit was sustained by love for Alzira. When he now learns that Alzira is herself a prisoner in Lima, he leads the male Peruvian chorus in a fierce martial cabaletta, invoking the “Dio della guerra,” the Incan god of war, Poli magnificent here with ringing top notes and heroic coloring. The chorus is eager to fight and the score notes that “they all embrace one another with flashing eyes and savage exultation.” These Peruvians, in Manuel Renga’s production, are not costumed as feathered primitives but rather as modern campesinos in Andean cowboy hats, so that Zamoro might appear as a Latin American leader in the generation of Bolívar in the nineteenth century, or Che Guevara in the twentieth century, or even the Peruvian Shining Path. Zamoro was Verdi’s very next tenor role after the outlaw Ernani but already pointed toward the Roma hero Manrico of the next decade, all of these parts already in Poli’s repertory. Most interestingly, Zamoro could be seen as a sort of first iteration of the Incan tenor role of Don Alvaro in La Forza del Destino— imagine Zamoro crossing the ocean and falling in love with a Spanish noblewoman— and considering Forza alongside Alzira perhaps allows us a clearer sense of how Verdi contemplated Don Alvaro’s Incan identity.

The baritone role of Zamoro’s Spanish nemesis Gusmano is perhaps more musically complex, and his unreciprocated love for Alzira adds an element of powerful longing to his music. Florida-born Spanish-American baritone Daniel Luis de Vicente was a huge success in this role with superb Verdian phrasing and darkly beautiful colorings. He sang his first aria of infatuation for Alzira while emerging from a gallery hung with sixteenth-century paintings of popes, cardinals, and princes, allowing him to bridge the spaces of colonial conquest and contemporary conflict. Maria Torbidoni sang the title role of Alzira with all its bel canto ornamentation, torn between her love for Zamoro and her father’s diplomatic endorsement of a Spanish marriage to Gusmano. She and Poli harmonized passionately in their love duet, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Gusmano in a frenzy to arrest and destroy his rival.

Photo: Roberto Ricci

Zamoro denounces him with Cavaradossian contempt—carnefice!—setting up the first-act finale ensemble which begins with Alvaro and Gusmano, father and son, bass and baritone, contesting Zamoro’s fate (for it was Zamoro the savage who gave Alvaro his life in the prologue). “Trema trema!” sings Gusmano, attempting to terrorize the lovers who respond unintimidated. With her voice rising above the entire company, Torbidoni ascended chromatically with sustained notes on high G, G-sharp, A, A-sharp, and then threw herself into a series of stirring high Bs of soprano defiance. Conlon beautifully brought together all the vocal parts and orchestral forces that make this first-act finale a Verdian masterpiece.

Radically different was the marvelous finale of the last act, this time with Zamoro appearing just in time to murder Gusmano before he can marry Alzira, robed for her wedding like the Holy Virgin in Latin American folk art. Cammerano was the librettist for Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835, so the interrupted wedding was one of his trademarks, and the original Zamoro, Pavian tenor Gaetano Fraschini, was the most famous Edgardo of the era, perfectly prepared for the role of the wedding crasher in Alzira. The dying Gusmano, however, unexpectedly forgives his murderer and blesses the Peruvian lovers over harp arpeggios, discovering the baritone pathos of the conquistador, not heartless after all. The reconciliation is not entirely convincing but a musical occasion of great Verdian beauty and faithful to Voltaire, who had also imagined this conclusion of reconciliation—an almost counterfactual conclusion since, of course, the Spanish imperial conquest and domination of Latin America did in fact occur. For Verdi, as in the later composition of the death of Simon Boccanegra, it was perhaps a moment for fantasizing that the death of a repentantly magnanimous baritone might offer a moment of peace and reconciliation in a world of violence and war. In this regard, it is worth having a look at philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s new book: The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom (2026), mostly about Mozart, but also considering Verdi.

De Vicente returned in the Verdi Gala on October 10, Verdi’s birthday, playing two unrepentant roles. First, in Il Corsaro he was the Muslim Pasha Seid whose harem is the setting of the second act, and with richly powerful tone he invoked “Allah vincitor,” resisting the Christian assault. De Vicente was equally implacable as the Christian crusader Count of Toulouse, condemning to death the knight Gaston on a false charge of attempted murder, in the third act of Jérusalem. Yet the standout stars of the birthday gala were the Mexican-American tenor Galeano Salas and the young Italian soprano Alessia Panza as a harem captive in both operas, Gulnara and Hélène in Corsaro and Jérusalem respectively. Panza sang gorgeously of her plight with a richly full tone that filled the Teatro Regio, displaying a lovely trill in Gulnara’s cabaletta and soaring above the chorus as Hélène denounced her father for condemning her lover Gaston to death.

Salas was the Byronic corsair who tried to rescue Gulnara in Corsaro, and then took the role of the falsely accused Gaston in Jérusalem, the French version of I Lombardi, reconceived by Verdi for Paris in 1847. Singing with elegant French phrasing and plaintively reedy tenorial tone, Salas, following Conlon closely in the pit and accompanied onstage by a Latin chorus of crusading knights, performed the most beautiful Verdi scene that you’ve never heard— unless you know Jérusalem. It is the judgment scene of a man condemned to death protesting his innocence, not in anger but with deepest pathos. The leading tenor role in I Lombardi (1843) was, unusually, a Muslim prince, Oronte, who won the love of the Christian harem captive, almost unprecedented in the Muslim-Christian dynamics of operatic history. Verdi, however, eliminated the Muslim prince when he remade I Lombardi as Jérusalem, and just as the Lombards became Frenchmen, so Oronte became the Frenchman Gaston, legally subject to condemnation by the French crusaders. The judgment scene simply did not exist in I Lombardi (as Gaston did not exist) and was composed as something entirely new for Paris, for a tenor on trial, not stoically silent like Radames before his judges in Aida, but heartbreakingly beautiful as the wrongly accused man lamenting the cruelty of the fate inflicted upon him by his own people in a distant foreign land.

Verdi was at home in European opera capitals from Naples to Paris, and even traveled as far as St. Petersburg (for the premiere of La Forza del Destino) but did not go to Cairo (for the premiere of Aida). He was always most at home at his villa of Sant’Agata, near Busseto, in the province of Parma. Though he never left Europe, his operatic scenarios ranged more widely, and his genius brought to life the characters of distant worlds, characters whose human emotions, for Verdi as for Voltaire, were often universally recognizable. The not-so-savage Peruvians of Alzira seemed altogether at home in the elegant Parma Teatro Regio, where the Parma Verdi Festival continues to explore even the most rarely staged scores and scenarios of Verdi’s distant and familiar worlds.