Giuseppe Verdi 1813-1901

Nabucco

For fifty years, from his first opera Oberto (1839) to his late masterpieces Otello (1893) and Falstaff (1893), Verdi dominated musical theatre in Italy. His career began with great promise when his first opera opened to public acclaim, and brought him lasting and crucially important relationships with La Scala, Milan and the music publishers, Ricordi. Verdi wrote his weak second opera, a Rossinian comedy, Un giorno di regno (1840) at a period of crisis in his life that almost ended his career. At this time, the 27-year-old composer lost his wife and both children. The failure of this opera must have been the last straw for the desperate young composer. Verdi thought he had failed both as man and composer, and decided never to write another opera.

To rescue the distraught composer from the depth of depression, the director of La Scala, Bartolomeo Merelli, sent him the libretto of Nabuccodonosor. It was the work of Temistocle Solera and based on two chapters from the second book of Kings in the Old Testament. It depicts the desperate attempts of the Jewish people to survive their Babylonian exile. They gain their freedom only after the tyrant Nabucco, who has proclaimed himself God and been driven suddenly mad, is healed by his acceptance of the God of the Hebrews. Solera’s highly romantic drama, in which liberty is simply a sub-plot to the central theme of jealousy, is a fine work, but it is transformed by Verdi’s music into a brilliant drama of human conflict.

Thirty-five years later, Verdi described how, in the dead of night, he was suddenly inspired by the words ‘Va pensiero, sull’ali dorate’ (‘Fly, dreams, on golden wings’), the prayer of the Hebrew slaves. These words were the starting point of a new composition and a new life. The triumph of the Milan première in Spring 1842 showed how Verdi had articulated the patriotic feelings of the people of northern Italy, who were at that time forced to live under Hapsburg rule as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From then on, Verdi would be not only Italy’s most important opera composer, but also one of its leading political figures.