Opera Note: Save your Viaticus Latin Folks, Rome's Gonna Rise Again

--Okay, okay, I'm tired of your begging. So I'll do the Met, but only on one condition.
--Sure, name it.
--That you let me do Attila.
--That we let you do--um, say again?

Well, I suppose it didn't actually happen quite like that, but I do know two things: (1) after years of trying, the Met finally did snag Ricardo Muti for a conducting gig; and (2) they presented him in one of Verdi's lesser known and (let's be frank about it) weaker operas.

The Met's presentation is saved by two facts: one, like Shakespeare, Verdi may sometimes create an inferior product, but never a really bad one, nor a product that lacks in interest. And two: Muti himself, who seems unfailingly able to work his magic with Verdi-- so much so that if I'm right, and that if he did negotiate for Attila, then the chances are he was onto something, and understood that he could nurture something on this unpromising soil that would be worth the effort.

Attila's biggest drawback may be the source of its considerable success in its own time: it is, perhaps, Verdi's most "political" opera, with a theme--beleaguered Romans fight back against uncouth Huns```--fit almost too neatly into the aspirations of Italians in his day.

What saves it--I assume, what Muti saw in it, is that it begins to sound like (although it has not yet fully become) the mature Verdi. Julian Budden says:

"[O]f all Verdi's essays in the grand manner composed to date [1846] none shows so great a consistency of language. Even Nabucco contains reminiscences of Donizetti and Rossini. In Attila every phrase is characteristic, each aria is an archetype of the composer's e`arly manner.

Muti's conducting, as interpreted by the Met orchestra and its splendid chorus, affirm the intuition that Budden is right here, and they make it all worth the price of admission. Which is a good thing, because nothing else was spectacularly impressive. Singing was not bad but fairly routine (did they blow their casting budget on the conductor?). The set seemed to be some kind of Italian jungle with holes in it, so you felt like you were watching most of the performance through a porthole or a well-trimmed Dunkin' Donut. But forget that: Muti's conducting alone was enough to justify the Met's decision (if it was a decision) to let him have his way.