Pabst's Blue Ribbon

To mark the 100th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi's birth, the city of Verona mounted a production of Aïda in its local amphitheater that was hard to forget: the 138-ft.-wide stage was filled with more than 1,000 singers and actors, not to mention ten horses and a cow. That was 40 years ago. More recently, Veronese have noted with pique that Rome's summer opera, in the huge old ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, have been serving up Aïda on a 167-ft. stage replete with camels, ancient obelisks and, for a finale, a burst of hundreds of red, blue and green rockets. This year Verona rose to the challenge.

German Movie Director George Wilhelm Pabst, hired to restage Aïda, crammed three elephants, four camels, ten horses and a cow onstage, with 1,500 people, 2,000 Riviera palms, and a 53-ft. Egyptian statue. As a clincher, a navigable canal (representing the River Nile) stretched between the stage and the 30,000 onlookers. The singing, with Italy's current top Soprano Maria Callas as Aïda and Metropolitan Opera Tenor Mario del Monaco as Radames, was first-rate too.

Verona was unwilling to leave it at that. Last week it staged a monster Trovatore, with mass movements akin to wheeling infantry; for this week, it was preparing a third Verdi epic, La Forza del Destino. Director Pabst was keeping his operation plans top secret, but Veronese had high hopes. Last time he worked on Forza (in Florence last spring), only the last-minute protests of the scandalized opera management kept him from bringing the Act III battle scenes up to date with armored cars and tanks.