Feathers in the Wind with Verdi's La donna è mobile
The Listen Guide

Leaving the Heavy Cannons at Home

When you sit down to listen to La donna è mobile, pay attention first to how light and airy the orchestra sounds behind the singer. I scored the accompaniment for strings, flutes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns, deliberately leaving the heavy brass and percussion out of the room. The strings pluck and bow a crisp three-eight rhythm that acts like a springboard, bouncing the solo tenor voice along from phrase to phrase. If you listen closely to the woodwinds and horns, you will hear them tossing in quick little answers whenever the singer pauses to catch his breath.

A Title Etched in Glass

People often ask how the song got its name, and the answer is simply that La donna è mobile is the very first line the Duke of Mantua sings. In Italian, those words mean that woman is fickle, which is a bit rich coming from a man who is about to seduce yet another woman right there at the start of Act 3 of Rigoletto. My librettist Francesco Maria Piave took the idea from the line Souvent femme varie in Victor Hugo's 1832 play Le roi s'amuse. The story goes that King Francis I of France once scratched that original French couplet onto a windowpane at the Château de Chambord, though nobody knows for sure if the king really vandalized his own glass.

Two Verses and a Strut

Choosing the form for La donna è mobile was a straightforward business because I wanted a tune that would stick in your head after a single hearing. Instead of building a complicated sonata or a sprawling rondo, I cast the whole piece as a simple strophic canzone made of two matching verses. I framed those two verses with a lively eight-bar orchestral tune that opens the piece, returns between the stanzas, and wraps things up at the end. Over the next few paragraphs, we will walk through the opening instrumental ritornello and each of the two verses so you can hear how all the pieces fit together.

Section 1: Eight Bars to Clear the Throat

In this opening eight-bar introduction, I set the tempo at a brisk Allegretto in the bright key of B major so the music immediately feels carefree. The strings and winds play the main melody right away, giving the listener a taste of the tune before the tenor even steps forward. I shaved a beat off the end of each short phrase here, which makes the rhythm trip eagerly ahead like a man hurrying down the tavern stairs for a fresh glass of wine. By the eighth bar, the orchestra lands neatly back in B major and steps aside, rolling out the carpet for the Duke of Mantua to begin.

Section 2: The Pot Calling the Kettle Fickle

The first verse keeps that exact same Allegretto pace and B major key as the tenor picks up the melody the orchestra just introduced. As he compares women to feathers in the wind, each of his vocal lines skips its final resting bar until the very end of the stanza, keeping the mood restless and breezy. Halfway through the verse, the harmony takes a brief dip into darker shadows before snapping right back to the sunny home key as he finishes his complaint. The orchestra then jumps back in with its eight-bar ritornello, giving our shameless singer a moment to smile at himself before he starts all over again.

Section 3: The High Note I Never Wrote

For the second verse, we stay right in B major at the same lively tempo, while the Duke of Mantua claims that any man who trusts a woman is bound to be miserable. The melody follows the exact same path as the first stanza, which is the whole secret to why audiences could whistle it in the streets of Venice the next day. Right at the end, the singer launches into a showy final cadenza where tenors today love to hold a ringing high B4 to bring the house down. Between you and me, the highest note I actually wrote in my manuscript at Casa Ricordi was an A-sharp 4, so that famous top note is a bit of extra peacocking added by singers later on.

Go On and Press Play

Now it is time for you to listen to La donna è mobile for yourself. Press the play button and let this little tavern song carry you right into the third act of Rigoletto. As the music skips along, keep an ear out for those clipped phrases and that uninvited high note at the very end. I hope you have as much fun following this tune from start to finish as I had putting it on paper back in 1851.