Verdi: Nabucco - "Va, pensiero..."

In order to accompany the children who in the years to come would delight the world with their music, Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi came into this world in Roncalli, Italy, on October 10, 1813. Among his future colleagues were Mendelssohn, four years old; Chopin and Schumann, both three years old; and Franz Liszt, barely a two-year-old child.
But Giuseppe was not going to be a pianist but an opera composer.

From the humble village of Roncale, where his parents ran a small inn and a grocery store, he arrived in Milan in 1832 for further studies by means of a scholarship obtained through a wholesale trader who supplied the modest business of the family. However, the future composer was rejected at the Conservatory and had to take private lessons. Even so, the stay in Milan would be a significant experience in his life because it was there where he discovered the world of theatre and, thus, his true vocation.

The wholesaler Antonio Barezzi had been one of the first to notice the artistic talent of the little Giuseppe because, in addition to being a merchant, he held the position of director of the Philharmonic Society in the nearby town of Busseto.
Antonio had four daughters. The elder, named Margherita, soon caught Giuseppe's attention and in 1836 she accepted the proposal, after the composer got the positions of organist and teacher of Busseto's music school, on his return from Milan.

Giuseppe Verdi, c. 1840
(1813 - 1901)

But their life together turned out to be a single and great misfortune. In a very short time they suffered the death of their first son, and soon, the second one. Finally, in 1840, it was Margherita who passed away, at her twenty-six years.

For this reason, perhaps, the first great masterpiece of Verdi could only emerge two years later, in 1842, when the opera Nabucco –based on a biblical story that depicts the episode of the slavery of the Jews in Babylon–, was premiered at La Scala in Milan.

The work reveals in the third act a unique moment in the history of the opera. The choir sings the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, or Va, Pensiero sull'alli dorate (Fly, thought, on golden wings), a song of freedom that in its day encountered an unprecedented identification between audience and music, given the circumstances that the peoples of future Italy were going through under the Austrian domination.

Today, all peoples everywhere give a salute to ceremonies which commemorate great events by singing the chorus "Va, Pensiero". So has happened recently, and precisely, in Italy, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the nation's creation. In presence of Berlusconi, in 2011, conductor Riccardo Muti made a short speech protesting cuts in Italy's arts budget, then asked the audience to sing again "Va, Pensiero" in support of culture. Likewise, modestly, Chilean people celebrated in 1990 the end of the dictatorship, at the National Stadium in Santiago de Chile.

The rendition, by the Choir and Orchestra of Teatro alla Scala, Milan, conducted by Riccardo Muti, includes the encore, that already has almost become a tradition. It is a remarkable experience to pay attention to the last few bars when the orchestra becomes silent and the voices continue to sing a cappella, dying down in a diminuendo that makes imperceptible the precise moment the sound gave way to silence.

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