‘Va, pensiero’ (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves) from ‘Nabucco’

Program notes

About the Work

In 1840 Giuseppe Verdi’s life was in ruins. Within a short span he had lost his two young children and his wife, and his comic opera Un giorno di regno had been a fiasco at La Scala. He resolved to give up composing. According to the story he told much later in life, the impresario of La Scala pressed a libretto on him anyway (Temistocle Solera’s Nabucco, a drama of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and the captive Hebrews), and when Verdi threw it on the table at home, it fell open at the words ‘Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate’ (‘Go, thought, on golden wings’). He could not get them out of his head, and the opera was written. Whether or not the anecdote is embroidered, Nabucco, first performed at La Scala on 9 March 1842, was the triumph that launched one of the greatest careers in operatic history.

‘Va, pensiero’ is sung in the third act by the Hebrews, exiled and enslaved on the banks of the Euphrates, as they long for their lost homeland. The text paraphrases Psalm 137: ‘By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept.’ It later came to be linked, in popular memory, with the Italian struggle for unity and independence, although historians now question how far it served as a rallying song at the time. When Verdi died in 1901, crowds in Milan sang it in his honour, and Arturo Toscanini led a great choir in it when the composer’s body was moved to its final resting place.

What to Listen For

After a short orchestral introduction, with its quiet, expectant string tremolo and a pause, the choir enters softly with the famous melody, and for much of the chorus the voices sing in unison, not in harmony. It is a deliberate and powerful effect: a whole people singing with one voice. The melody swells in a great arch to a fortissimo climax at the words ‘O mia patria, sì bella e perduta!’ (‘O my homeland, so lovely and lost!’), then falls back. Only near the end does Verdi spread the voices into harmony, as the chorus prays for strength to endure, and the music fades away in quiet, harp-accompanied resignation.