About the work
One-act opera by Lorenzo Ferrero to a libretto by Dario Oliveri, first performed on 26 March 2011 at the Teatro Comunale di Modena. The roughly 50-minute work was commissioned by the Teatro Comunale di Bologna for the celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of Italian unification.
Plot
In February 1842, impresario Bartolomeo Merelli rehearses Verdi's Nabucco with his singers at La Scala in Milan. Between rehearsals, a debate flares up over the opera's artistic merit and its political charge on the eve of the Risorgimento. Two dream sequences look ahead to the work's later triumph and to Verdi's path toward becoming a senator of the unified Kingdom of Italy.
Cultural significance
Ferrero thus links the genesis legend of Nabucco directly to the memory culture surrounding Italian unification in 1861, using the rehearsal setting to play the era's art and politics off against each other.