My wife and I loved the opera, Nabucco, here at the Prague State Opera on 24 April, 2024. The singers and the chorus were tremendous. My reason for not giving a 5 rating has everything to do with the confusion caused by the settings, and the extraneous and superfluous characters that were worked into all the scenes. Verdi wrote Nabucco to be set about 500 BC in Babylon and Jerusalem. The first act starts in a museum somewhere in Europe? in the 1950s. There are two bellhops walking around the stage, later we see two young girls, I assume they represent Abigaille and Fenena as children. Then later we are introduced to five flying monkeys. I was thinking the opera should be retitled "Nabucco meets the Wizard of Oz" I was searching for a program in the hope that I would see some hidden meaning the additions.
At the end of Act III, the chorus took a time machine and found themselves back in Babylon, circa 500 BC, to sing Va Pensiero.