Italian Singing Va Analysis

The famous Hebrew Chorus Va, pensiero is one of the best known choruses in opera and has been considered to be an important symbol of Verdi`s political ideals. It has gone down in the history books as fact that the chorus was almost immediately taken up as an unofficial anthem for Italian unification. Example 3.1: The famous Va, pensiero melody from Verdi’s Nabucco. Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Today, despite the popularity of Va, pensiero not everyone agrees with the interpretation of its influence on Italian people or politics. Roughly speaking there are two views: the traditional and the revisionist.

The traditional view has its root in Verdi’s earliest biographers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. According

There are many question among the historians and musicologists surrounding Verdi`s connection with Italian nationalism. One of the main question being debated is how was this connection formed and when exactly did Verdi achieve this status. Roger Parker began to collect and examine some representative sample of the kind of evidence at present available that connects Verdi`s early music with political unrest and he found a mistake in Franco Abbiati`s 1959 biography of the composer. Abbiati had quoted the review of the Gazetta musicale di Milano , in which is reported that the audience demanded an encore of "Va pensiero" despite the strict police regulation against encores. However, Parker discovered that Abbiati had more or less invented the passage; or rather, he took it from a different review, referring to a different chorus. According to Philip Gossett, it has been correctly demonstrated that, the chorus of Hebrew slaves “Va,pensiero” was not repeated at the first performance, the repeated chorus was “Immenso Jeovah,” and there are no evidence that the people viewed Verdi as a leader of the

The chorus sings with one voice; their gently sweeping melody and the basic harmonies give the impression of a folk song-like innocence and simplicity. Verdi`s use of unison voices was a compelling way of representing both solidarity and metaphorically the struggle of Italian people in an era when Italy was still divided, to hear "the nation" singing as one had powerful political resonance. Julian Budden wrote about the chorus “The great swing, the sense of a thousand voices is something inherent in the melody even if it is sung as a solo or played on an instrument.” According to David Kimbell ‘the choral texture becomes a musical metaphor of the democratic ideal’

The true power of 'Va, pensiero' reigns in its universal appeal to all Italians. The chorus is a stirring hymn calling for the end of oppression and servitude. It is obvious to see why the chorus became the unofficial anthem of the Risorgimento and why every Italian of the era knew the lyrics by