The chorus 'Va, pensiero' - 'Fly, thought, on golden wings' - from Giuseppe Verdi's opera 'Nabucco' (1842) is one of the most remarkable examples in all of musical history of a biblical text finding a second political life centuries after its composition. Psalm 137, written in the sixth century BCE by Jewish exiles sitting beside the canals of Babylon, became in 1842 the anthem of Italians who identified their subjugation to Austria with Israel's captivity in Babylon - and the identification was felt so immediately, so viscerally, that audiences at La Scala reportedly demanded encores in an Italian opera house where encores were essentially unknown.
Psalm 137:1-3 is among the most heartbreaking passages in the Psalter: 'By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!'' The captives cannot sing: the harps are hung on the willows, the songs of Zion have been silenced by captivity. The psalm voices the experience of cultural and spiritual dispossession - not merely political subjugation but the loss of the capacity for joyful expression that is itself a dimension of freedom.
Verdi set this psalm text for the Hebrew slaves in Act III of 'Nabucco,' and the Italian audiences who heard it in 1842 did not need the identification explained to them. Northern Italy had been under Austrian control since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and the Risorgimento - the nationalist movement for Italian unification - was gathering momentum. The image of a captive people singing of their lost homeland, prohibited from expressing their national identity, precisely described the cultural situation of educated Italians who could not freely express their political aspirations.
Psalm 137:4 - 'How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?' - is the verse that gives the opera its deepest resonance. The question is not rhetorical but genuine: is it possible to maintain cultural and religious identity under conditions of occupation? The opera, and the Risorgimento movement it came to symbolize, answered with a qualified yes: the song of Zion could be preserved precisely in the act of mourning its absence. To sing 'Va, pensiero' was already to perform the national identity whose suppression it lamented.
Isaiah 40:1 - 'Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the LORD's hand double for all her sins' - provided Verdi with the broader narrative context of the opera: the Babylonian captivity ends, and the people return. The opera traces the full arc from captivity through spiritual transformation to liberation, with Nebuchadnezzar himself converting to the God of Israel and issuing the decree that frees the Hebrew slaves.
At Verdi's funeral in 1901, a crowd of 300,000 gathered in the streets of Milan and spontaneously began singing 'Va, pensiero.' The moment was both a tribute to the composer and a demonstration of the psalm's continuing power: sixty years after its premiere, the lament of the Hebrew exiles was still the Italian people's way of honoring their most beloved musician, who had given them a voice when they had none.
The chorus remains Italy's unofficial second national anthem, performed at soccer matches, political rallies, and state funerals. Its continued resonance demonstrates the extraordinary portability of Psalm 137: a song of Babylonian exile becomes a song for every people who has experienced dispossession, and its biblical roots give it a moral authority that purely political anthems cannot match.