ORF-E
German
1 x 124 min
Worldwide

The St. Margarethen quarry, with its harsh gorges and gentle hills, provides the ideal backdrop for a suspenseful evening of opera featuring Giuseppe Verdi’s first major success, “Nabucco”. Oppression and freedom, arrogance and faith, trench-crossing love, hatred, hope and despair – strong, always contemporary emotions, with a biblical background. The dramatic story from the Old Testament tells of the struggle between the megalomaniac Babylonian king, Nabucco, and the oppressed Israelites in ancient Babylon. The lament of the Jewish prisoners, “Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate” (Fly, thought, on golden wings), is still world-famous today and became Italy’s secret national anthem already in Verdi’s times.