Va, pensiero

Nabucco is the Italian name for Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon who conquered Jerusalem in 586 BC, destroyed its Temple and took the Jews into exile in his capital. These events form the background to Verdi’s opera. In Part III, the captives are working on the banks of the Euphrates, Babylon’s great river. Far from home, with no hope of returning, they let their thoughts make the journey they cannot. This is the image behind the chorus’s opening words: a thought taking flight towards home on golden wings.

Solera’s libretto uses the poetic Italian of the nineteenth century, with words that can puzzle even an Italian reader today. Here is the meaning of each stanza.

In the first stanza, the exiles send their thoughts towards the hills and slopes of their homeland, where gentle breezes carry warmth and fragrance. The printed libretto used “libera” (‘free’) to describe the air; when setting the words to music, Verdi chose “tepide” (‘warm’) instead.

In the second stanza, they ask their thoughts to greet the River Jordan and the fallen towers of Zion — Jerusalem. Then comes the familiar cry of longing for a homeland both beautiful and lost, and for memories that are precious yet painful.

In the third stanza, the exiles turn to the golden harp of the prophets — the “fatidici vati” — hanging silent from a willow branch. They ask it to sound again, to stir their memories and speak of the past.

In the final stanza, “Sòlima” is another name for Jerusalem, derived from its ancient Greek name. The exiles ask the harp either to lament the city’s destruction or to offer a song inspired by God — a “concento” — that will give them the strength to bear their suffering.

Solera did not invent the image of harps hanging from willow trees. It comes from Psalm 137, whose Latin opening is Super flumina Babylonis — ‘By the rivers of Babylon’. The psalm describes Jewish exiles weeping at the memory of Zion, their instruments set aside. Solera drew on it to create four rhyming stanzas, giving a whole people a shared voice.

Va, pensiero opens with a brief orchestral introduction: hushed, mysterious sounds give way to a sudden string tremolo, followed by flute and clarinet playing pianissimo. The chorus enters gently, in a reflective mood. The music swells as the singers call upon the harp — “Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati” — before subsiding to a pianissimo close, like a last whisper of hope. Verdi chose the unusual key of F-sharp major and originally scored the chorus for mixed voices.

Verdi wrote Nabucco during the darkest period of his life, following the deaths of his wife and two children. He had come close to giving up opera altogether when La Scala’s impresario, Bartolomeo Merelli, persuaded him to read Solera’s libretto. In 1879, Verdi told his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, that he had thrown the manuscript onto a table on arriving home. As it fell, it opened at the line “Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate”. It is a compelling story, but Verdi recounted it almost forty years after the event. Few documents from that period survive, leaving room for anecdotes to fill the gaps. What is certain is that Nabucco received its première at La Scala on 9 March 1842 and became Verdi’s first great success. He later regarded it as the true beginning of his career.

For many years, the story went that the first-night audience demanded an encore of Va, pensiero. Research for the opera’s critical edition, led by the musicologist Roger Parker, showed that there had indeed been an encore — but of a different chorus. It was “Immenso Jehovà”, the unaccompanied hymn of thanksgiving sung by the Jews in the finale. Va, pensiero only gradually became Nabucco’s best-loved number in the years and decades that followed.

Verdi died in Milan on 27 January 1901, having asked for a simple funeral with no singing or music. Contemporary accounts describe how, at dawn on 30 January, the crowd lining the route nevertheless broke into his famous chorus. A month later, on 27 February, his remains and those of his wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, were moved to the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, the home he had founded for elderly musicians. More than eight hundred singers, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, sang Va, pensiero at the head of the procession. Contemporary reports put the crowd at around three hundred thousand.

In April 1907, the La Scala Chorus recorded the piece in Milan for the Gramophone Company. It has remained a fixture of opera houses and recordings ever since — one of the few operatic choruses that audiences have truly made their own. On 12 March 2011 at the Rome Opera, Riccardo Muti took the highly unusual step of agreeing to an encore and invited the audience to join the chorus. They rose to their feet and sang.