The Hebrews and the Levites are gathered together in Solomon's temple to lament the fate of the Israelites, who have just been defeated by the Babylonian king Nabucco, who is about to enter the city ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Convincing Verdi to compose Nabucco was not a simple matter. Still under thirty, he had vowed never to compose ...

For anyone lucky enough to have seen a performance at the beautiful Arena di Verona will know that out of the thousands of seats, very few are actually comfortable. Three hours sitting on stone steps ...

When opera was born, in Florence around 1600, no one could have imagined that it might develop from its intimate courtly origins into the kind of mammoth public spectacle that, three centuries later, ...