Did Verdi's chorus really make Italians rise up?

Not in the way the legend says. The story goes that when the chorus "Va, pensiero" was first sung in Milan in 1842, the audience, burning with patriotic feeling, demanded an encore, though encores were forbidden by the government. In fact the piece encored was a different one, the hymn "Immenso Jehova". The music historian Philip Gossett says that myths exaggerating Verdi's patriotic feeling began circulating during the 19th century.

What is true is dramatic enough. Verdi's opera Nabucco, first performed at La Scala on 9 March 1842, is considered the work that permanently established his reputation. He wrote it after a terrible stretch: his two infant children and then his 26-year-old wife had died, his second opera had failed, and he vowed never to compose again. His own account, written almost four decades later, of how he was talked back into it may be romanticised: the scholar Julian Budden says he was concerned to weave a protective legend about himself. At the first rehearsal the stagehands shouted their approval and beat on the floor with their tools.

"Va, pensiero", the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, recalls the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. Its picture of exiles singing about their homeland, with lines like "O my country, so beautiful, and lost", was thought to have resonated with many Italians. Whether Verdi meant it as a patriotic anthem is debated: some modern scholars see little link between his operas of the 1840s and nationalism, while Gossett thinks those revisionists may have gone too far. When he died, onlookers in Milan sang it as his funeral procession passed, and in 1981 a writer even proposed it as Italy's national anthem.

The slogan "Viva Verdi" also belongs to a later time than the legend suggests: it became an acronym for "Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia" only in 1859, in Naples.