Verdi's *Nabucco* was yesterday's Metropolitan Opera broadcast.  It's
an opera w/ which I'm not familiar, except for the overture and the "Va
pensiero* chorus and I have a couple of questions after hearing the
broadcast.

I understand it's a relatively early work.  I seemed to find myself
hearing foreshadowings of themes from later Verdi operas in this work.
Does this sound reasonable or have I just heard more of this opera than
I realized which I was now recognizing?

While I like certain operas, I am not even an amateur expert on operas.
All through the performance, the male singers often seemed unable to
hold a long drawn our note, moving forth and forth around it. I wasn't
listening closely enough to identify the roles or singers involved. Would
this failure to hold a note have been deliberate or a deficiency in the
singer?  I've heard opera mavens criticize singers for their "wobbles".
Did anybody besides me hear what I could imagine being so described?
Or would this have been, for better or for worse, a deliberate vibrato?
Or is there no such thing in competent singing?  (My own preference, I
believe would be, assuming vibrato occasionally being acceptable, that
the less of it I hear, the better I like it.)

Walter Meyer