Note: While this production, featuring Canadian singers Robert Pomakov and Leah Gordon, closed over the summer, it is available at OperaVision.eu and on YouTube until February 15, 2026.
You can be forgiven for being simultaneously confused and amused after watching Heidenheim Opera Festival’s production of Verdi’s Attila on OperaVision’s YouTube channel.
After all, in librettist Francesco Maria Piave’s completion of the final act, Odabella avenges her murdered father and his Aquileia subjects by stabbing Attila, King of the Huns, with the sword he’d given her in the opera’s Prologue. However, in director Matthias Piro’s staging for Heidenheim, a female chorister took the sword from Odabella, leaving her to watch a writhing Attila fall dead on his back.
Not only did Piro play fast and loose with the climactic ending, but he completely ignored Attila’s royal entrance music in the Prologue and had the Hun jump the gun and strut out on stage at the start of the opening chorus, “Urli, rapine.” Speaking of what should have been a regal arrival, there wasn’t a chariot, toga or sandal in sight as Piro updated the action from the mid-fifth century to present-day Europe, aided and abetted by Lisa Moro’s stage and costume design.
In Scene 1, Piro conflated the Roman general Ezio with Pope Leo the Great, having the former appear curiously garbed in a curate’s cassock with a large cross hanging around his neck. As for the scenery, there was no vision of St. Peter or St. Paul with sword in hand as pictured in Raphael’s The Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila, the Vatican fresco Verdi had in mind, but rather an imitation and reproduction of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam projected onto the suspended screen above the raised rectangular platform. Ezio remained onstage for the Chorus of Hermits’ “Qual notte!” but he shed his cassock prior to the cadenza in his “Dagl’immortali vertici,” later swapping it out for a black sport coat handed to him by Odabella.
The first act set was a meeting hall populated with chairs. A mute Ezio, representing the old man in Attila’s dream, was on stage for the finale, while an AI mock-up of Pope Pius XII voiced by a cast member – a role billed as Leone rather than Pope Leo as per nineteenth-century Venetian censorship – ran on the screen.
Photo Credit: Oliver Vogel
Robert Pomakov as Attila with Marian Pop as Ezio in the Prologue of Attila at the Heidenheim Opera Festival
For Act Two, the stage was set up as a press conference with a podium placed in the centre and a phalanx of European flags planted upstage. In a topical display of art imitating life, Piro’s wild finale included a failed assassination attempt on Attila. Though the assassin had instead fatally shot a woman innocently bearing an EU cake, the audience roared with laughter as Attila re-emerged kneeling beside the podium, blood running from his right ear, à la Trump. The ensuing melee with pistols and rifles on stage plus video of Trump, Elon Musk’s infamous “Nazi” salute and the January 6th insurrection on the US Capitol received a mixture of loud boos, catcalls and applause.
The final act played out on a bare stage. And in case you’re wondering, Attila had no huge white bandage strapped to his ear, à la Trump. No doubt the affected lobe – or was it maybe the scapha or perhaps the helix? – had miraculously healed in the interim.
Robert Pomakov possesses the physique du rôle for Attila: shaved head, mountain man beard and a barroom brawler’s build. He strode the stage/platform as if he owned it, and coloured the Hun’s opening line, “Eroi, levatevi! Stia nella polvere chi vinto muor,” with a very heavy vibrato. But Pomakov also displayed different vocal shadings. In the first act finale, he successfully contrasted the breathless quality of “No! non è sogno” with the requisite smoother unfolding of “Spiriti, fermate.”
Leah Gordon’s rich timbre was heard to lovely effect in Odabella’s scena e romanza which opens Act One and her following duet with Foresto, “Si, quell’io son.” The role’s vocal demands are considerable. Alas, Gordon slightly overshot some of her high notes on occasion, like her concluding B-flat. And a handful of wrong notes – on the final syllable of “vendetta” under a fermata in the Act One duet as well as two incorrect tones on the repeated pleas “pietà, pietà” in the third act trio – suggest practiced-in errors not caught by the répétiteurs or the artistic team.
Adam Sánchez was a gleaming Foresto. One tiny blemish in his heart-wrenching delivery of Foresto’s scena e romanza was a C-natural sung instead of a C-sharp on “apprenderò.” Marian Pop was a rather fine Ezio who ended his “È gettata la mia sorte” with an interpolated, thrilling high B-flat. Jared Ice cut a dashing Leone. Who knew Leo the Great could look so good in uniform? The comprimario, Musa Nkuna, was a serviceable Uldino.
Petr Fiala’s Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno were an admirably solid ensemble. The house band, the aptly-named Cappella Aquileia under festival artistic director Marcus Bosch, who incidentally won the 2025 Opus Klassik prize for Opera Recording of the Year for Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco, have been wending their way through all of Verdi’s early operas. As a result, they had Verdi’s style down pat, and their sound was lean, never bloated.
Photo Credit: Oliver Vogel
The end of the second act of Atilla in the melee surrounding the assassination attempt
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