Va, pensiero (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves)

The story

"Va, pensiero", also called the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, is a chorus from Giuseppe Verdi's opera Nabucco, first staged in 1842. It recalls the Babylonian captivity after the destruction of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BC: the exiled Hebrews sing of their homeland. The libretto is by Temistocle Solera, who drew on Psalm 137.

Verdi wrote Nabucco at a hard moment in his life: his wife and children had all just died of illness. Despite a reported vow to give up opera, he was under contract to La Scala, and its director, Bartolomeo Merelli, pressed the libretto on him. At home Verdi happened to open it at "Va, pensiero" and, he later said, heard the words singing. At the first rehearsal the stagehands cheered and beat their tools on the floor and the sets. Verdi later said that this was the opera with which his artistic career really began, and the opera with its chorus established him as a major composer in 19th-century Italy.

Some scholars have held that the chorus was meant as an anthem for Italian patriots seeking to unify the country and free it from foreign rule in the years up to 1861, the exiles' longing for a lost homeland being thought to speak to many Italians. Some modern scholars reject this, seeing no link between Verdi's operas of the 1840s and 1850s and Italian nationalism, except for some passages of I Lombardi (1843). Other recent work, including Philip Gossett's study of the choruses of the 1840s, suggests that this revisionist view may have gone too far in dismissing the political meaning of "Va, pensiero".

When Verdi died, onlookers in the streets of Milan began singing "Va, pensiero" as his funeral procession passed. A month later, when he was reburied beside his wife at the Casa di Riposo, the young Arturo Toscanini conducted a choir of 820 singers in it.

On 27 January 1981 the journalist Giorgio Soavi proposed, in a letter published by Indro Montanelli in Il Giornale, that "Va, pensiero" replace Italy's national anthem. The idea was discussed and dropped, then taken up again without result by Senator Umberto Bossi in 2009; Bossi's party, Lega Nord, has adopted it as its official hymn and sings it at all party meetings. In 2011, after conducting the chorus during Nabucco at the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome, Riccardo Muti made a short speech against cuts to Italy's arts budget and asked the audience to sing it with the chorus in support of culture.

What it says

The exiled Hebrews, captive in Babylon, send their thoughts home to the country they have lost and pray for the strength to endure. The mood is a slow, solemn longing for home, sung by the whole people as one voice.

The words