Verdi politico: a wounded cliche regroups

The article sums up recent and not-so-recent debates about Giuseppe Verdi and the Risorgimento. It first discusses the image of Verdi's early (pre-1848) operas as 'political' works, one largely created in the later nineteenth century, as the newlyformed Italian state searched for national monuments. Except for a brief period in the immediate build-up and aftermath of 1848 (when many operatic events were caught up in the revolutionary cause), Verdi's operas were not associated with nationalist agendas until the late 1850s, when the brief vogue of the acrostic 'Viva V.E.R.D.I.' set in train a larger process of mythicization of certain passages from his earliest works, foremost among them the chorus 'Va pensiero' from Act 3 of Nabucco (1842). The latter part of the article discusses recent attempts to rehabilitate the image of Verdi as 'Vate del Risorgimento', in particular considering the nature of the evidence marshaled to this cause.