Sending Thoughts Home in Verdi's Va, pensiero
The Backstory

Ready to lock the piano for good

Back in 1840 in Milan, my life had fallen apart so completely that I swore I would never write another note of music. I had lost my two young children and my first wife, Margherita Barezzi, by June of that year, and my heart was simply broken. To make matters worse, my comic opera Un giorno di regno turned into a miserable failure that September, which felt like a cruel joke when I was already mourning. Writing a funny show while grieving is about as pleasant as trying to dance at a funeral, so I decided my career was over.

A pushy boss with big pockets

Thankfully, Bartolomeo Merelli, who ran the Teatro alla Scala, refused to let me sit in my room and sulk forever. He had a new libretto by Temistocle Solera about ancient Babylon that the Prussian composer Otto Nicolai had already turned down. Merelli practically shoved the pages into my coat pocket and told me to take them home, whether I wanted to read them or not. You cannot easily argue with a theatre manager who uses your own overcoat as a mailbox, so I walked home carrying the manuscript.

The dramatic flying manuscript trick

As I later liked to tell people in my 1879 Autobiographical Sketch, I tossed those pages onto my table and the booklet fell open by itself. My eyes landed straight on the line Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate, and the words stayed in my head until I had to sit down and compose again. Now, musicologists have their doubts about my neat little story and suspect I was dressing up the memory years later because I already knew the text. Still, every good opera man knows that a story about a flying book is much more exciting than admitting you just sat down and read the thing after dinner.

Homesick by the river

Those verses by Solera were based on Psalm 137, Super flumina Babylonis, and they belonged to an opera originally called Nabucodonosor, which we now call Nabucco. In the third part of the story, a group of exiled Jewish captives sits on the banks of the Euphrates in Babylon and sings about the homeland they miss. Because of who sings it on stage, English speakers usually call the piece the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. Even though I was just a grieving composer in Milan in 1841, their quiet ache for what they had lost matched my own mood down to the ground.

Keeping it simple for a crowd

When I set the words to music, I chose the warm key of F-sharp major and marked the singing entrance Largo and cantabile, meaning slow and songlike. Instead of writing complicated vocal fireworks, I had the whole chorus start by singing the exact same tune together over a soft orchestral background. The melody follows a simple four-part pattern where the opening tune comes back again at the end after a richer middle section, framed by a short introduction and ending. It is the kind of tune you can hum on your walk home from the theatre without accidentally spraining your voice.

Fifty-seven nights of job security

We finally put Nabucco on stage at the Teatro alla Scala on 9 March 1842, with Eugenio Cavallini conducting the performance. The night was a massive triumph that rescued my career from the ashes and made my name across the city. During the autumn season of 1842 alone, the theatre put on a record fifty-seven performances of the opera, and Giovanni Ricordi published the score at Casa Ricordi that same year. After thinking I was completely washed up, having the whole town buy tickets fifty-seven times in a single season was a very welcome change of pace.

Clapping for the wrong song

People love to tell a romantic tale that the premiere audience demanded an encore of Va, pensiero right then and there to defy an Austrian ban on encores. It makes for a wonderful rumour, especially if you enjoy imagining a theatre full of polite opera fans suddenly turning into rebels. However, the musicologist Roger Parker dug into the archives and showed that the crowd on opening night actually demanded their encore for a later prayer chorus called Immenso Jehova. I certainly never complained about which piece they clapped for, as long as they kept clapping for my opera.

An anthem that grew up later

Another popular belief is that listeners in 1842 immediately treated my chorus as a battle cry for the Risorgimento, the movement to unite Italy. In truth, that famous political reputation grew in the decades after unification, when people looked back and connected the song's longing for a homeland with their own history. Over time, Italians grew so fond of the tune that people have repeatedly suggested making it the unofficial or replacement national anthem of Italy. Not bad for a piece that Otto Nicolai did not even want to touch when it was offered to him first.

Eight hundred voices for a quiet man

The song stayed close to people's hearts right up to the end of my life and beyond. When my funeral procession moved through the streets of Milan in January 1901, bystanders along the road started singing Va, pensiero all on their own. A month later, when my second wife Giuseppina Strepponi and I were moved to our final resting place at the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, Arturo Toscanini conducted the piece. He brought in a choir of 820 singers for the occasion, which was certainly loud enough to make sure I heard them from the other side.

Still causing trouble in Rome

Even a century later, my little chorus has not lost its ability to stir up a theatre full of Italians. On 12 March 2011, Riccardo Muti was conducting Nabucco at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma to celebrate 150 years of Italian unification. When the crowd asked for an encore of Va, pensiero, he not only played it again, he turned around and invited the whole audience to sing along in protest against government budget cuts to arts and culture. It warms my heart to know that whenever politicians try to save a few coins at the expense of music, my chorus is still there to give them a hard time.