In 1876, the 66-year-old Giuseppe Verdi sat down and offered a remembrance of his early career, dictated to his publisher Giulio Ricordi. He considered the 1842 opera the true beginning of his artistic career. He had perhaps just experienced the lowest point of his life, a two-year period during which he lost his wife Margherita (Barezzi) and two children, Virginia and Icilio, all the while attempting to complete a comic opera, Un giorno di Regno, which ended in a spectacular failure. According to the composer he’d all but given up composing and delivered that message to Bartolomeo Merelli, the director of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, even returning a libretto that Merelli had hoped would entice Verdi into writing a new piece for his forthcoming season. Director Merelli evidently had great faith in the young composer, as he persisted in attempts to interest him in a return to opera, finally offering him a libretto by the poet Temistocle Solera, Nabucodonosor, a drama set during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews.
According to Verdi, Merelli stuffed the libretto into his coat pocket and shoved him out the door of his office. Verdi took the poem back to his rooms and angrily threw the copy onto his desk: “It had fallen open, and without realizing it I gazed at the page and read the line: “Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate.” From here on out Verdi’s story takes on the atmosphere of a 1930s movie biography: “One day a verse, the next day another, at one time a note, at another a phrase. Little by little the opera was written.” One loathes to disbelieve an original source, but the composer’s tale just doesn’t have the ring of authenticity; rather, it has the aura of an old man remembering his past through the eyes of an experienced man of the theatre with an incredible ability to tell a great yarn. It’s difficult to accept that the libretto just happened to open to the page of what was to become the most successful number in the show, the great chorus “Va pensiero”, and that it was from this inspiring moment that the work was to eventually spring. Whatever the actual succession of events that led to the writing of Nabucodonosor (whose title was later shortened to Nabucco for a production in Venice), the opera does glow with an inspiration that neither the comedy Un giorno di Regno nor Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio, his very first opera, had. By the time it was finished, Merelli, who’d promised to produce the opera immediately upon its completion, nearly had to back out on his promise as the 1842 season had already been fully formed and had three new operas in production. A fourth, with responsibility falling on the shoulders of a relatively untested young composer with no ‘hits’ under his belt, was a huge risk. Verdi argued, Merelli argued back, and finally the impresario agreed, with the caveat that the production and costumes would have to be pulled from older works in La Scala’s warehouses.
Verdi’s insistence on the 1842 season was based on the fact that Giuseppina Strepponi, the soprano who would later become his wife, and Giorgio Ronconi, the baritone, were already signed for that season and the composer knew that they would do justice to the score, as well as bring a certain notoriety to the production. In the case of Strepponi he turned out to be (temporarily) wrong as she ended up being in ill health and bad voice for the prima . (Her final scene, the death of Abigaille, was dropped after the first two performances and a new soprano, Teresa De Giuli-Borsi, sang the revival the following winter. However, Strepponi was re-engaged for the premiere at Parma in 1843 and it was evidently a great success. By this time, her relationship with the composer was blooming.) Ronconi, however, had a success in the title role and the first audiences were evidently enthusiastic about the new work, applauding the newly re-painted scenery, the orchestra, the singers, the chorus and the composer who was now regaled as the composer for the Risorgimento, the ongoing political and cultural movement to unite the Italian peninsula as one country. When Nabucco returned for the fall season it played fifty-seven performances, quite a record for the time.
The impact of the chorus “Va, pensiero” on the Austrian-controlled audiences cannot be overstated. Northern Italians naturally identified with the Jews’ captivity by Babylon because their territories were now under the thumb of their neighbors across the Alps. In fact, there was a law against encores on the opera stage for the very reason that it might be cause for public demonstration against imperial rule. Despite that fact, the chorus was encored to great acclaim and the piece remains to this day an unofficial national anthem in Italy. (“Va pensiero” was sung spontaneously in the streets of Milan at Verdi’s funeral in 1901 by thousands of mourners who turned out in the streets to pay homage to the beloved composer.)