Episode 1 Lucy Worsley's Nights at the Opera

For centuries in Western culture,

opera has been the greatest show on Earth.

It's also become part of the soundtrack to our lives.

Even if you don't like opera,

there are some melodies you're just going to recognise.

Maybe you've heard them in classic movies like this...

MUSIC: The Marriage Of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

..or like this.

MUSIC: Ride of the Valkyries by Richard Wagner

These operas may seem timeless now but each was written in a particular

city at a particular moment, and they captured the deepest hopes

and fears of the people living there then.

I want to find out how opera and history go hand-in-hand.

We've sort of forgotten this today, now that opera has become

a specialised interest, but opera used to be centre stage,

it used to be right at the heart of historical events.

I've picked some of the best-loved operas to show you how.

I'm going to visit the historic cities that shaped my operas,

explore the colourful cast of characters who composed them,

and show you how music can give us

a peephole to look back into turbulent times,

with the help of conductor Antonio Pappano.

I'll be exploring the nuts and bolts of the most famous arias,

duets and ensembles in the operatic repertoire.

MUSIC: The Marriage Of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

In this first programme, I'll explore four cities

and four operas which came out of the cauldron of European politics

between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Venice, where modern opera began,

where one of the steamiest and sexiest works ever was written.

MUSIC: The Coronation Of Poppea by Claudio Monteverdi

Vienna, where Mozart

and Beethoven wrote revolutionary operas for an age of revolution.

MUSIC: Fidelio by Ludwig van Beethoven

And Milan, home to an opera house

and an opera that helped to liberate a nation.

MUSIC: Nabucco by Giuseppe Verdi

MUSIC: Nessun Dorma by Giacomo Puccini

It's a song about football, isn't it?

I remember Pavarotti singing it at the 1990 World Cup.

But what the man is really singing is that even though

a powerful princess has promised to have him killed in the morning,

he is not going to die because he believes that the powerful

princess will fall in love with him.

So the song is really about emotion, it's about death,

it's about love, it's about all the big themes of opera.

Opera's trick of taking people on an emotional rollercoaster

like this made it history's most popular form of entertainment.

People were passionate about opera,

like some people seem to be about football today.

So how did that happen?

What does Antonio Pappano of London's Royal Opera think?

Sometimes a composer comes along who really captures

the essence of a time and a place, would you agree?

The great opera composers all,

at one time in their creative lives,

will seize...

..a moment,

will smell what is in the air politically,

socially and somehow write...

..a work of genius that reflects that moment in society.

It was seizing something that was already either

festering or blossoming.

Opera really got going in Venice in the 17th century,

with a work where singers express genuine

human emotions on the stage for the first time.

It could only have been written here.

Venice was a rich, powerful if rather decadent republic,

fiercely proud of its independence from Rome and the Church.

Venice was about to enter a golden age of culture.

It had become a haven for intellectuals.

Some of them were libertines looking for free love,

others were in search of free thinking instead.

This meant that you could even - and this was really unusual

for 17th century Italy - make fun of the Pope.

So this was a free-thinking, freewheeling kind of a place

and the arts flourished here, particularly opera.

This place was just packed with composers.

Opera began as a musical intermission between other

types of entertainment at court -

basically, a way for nobles to impress their guests.

These proto-operas seem a bit bonkers now.

Take La Pellegrina in 1589, where audiences were treated

to heavenly sunbeams, gods and goddesses and dragon-slaying.

By 1600, these musical bits had developed into opera.

The new art form took off, especially in Venice.

The first ever commercial opera house opened here in 1617,

and more followed.

Nobles leased boxes, everyone else went in the gallery or stalls.

Venice went mad for opera.

The noble families who ran the city had very often risen

up from the ranks of the merchants a few generations back.

So you could say that being entrepreneurial

was in their blood and they saw an opportunity to make money.

They invented opera as mass entertainment,

with things like publicity campaigns,

and season tickets and hits and of course flops, too.

And this could only have happened here in Venice.

It was this city that turned what had been a rarefied artform

into entertainment for a capitalist society.

The stage was set for Claudio Monteverdi,

who moved to Venice in 1613.

Monteverdi had been a court composer,

a glorified servant to the Duke of Mantua.

In 1607, he composed a full-length opera,

the oldest opera that is still being performed.

This was based, like those musical intermissions,

on a mythological tale.

Here it is the story of Orpheus and his unhappy trip to the underworld.

But Monteverdi got frustrated

composing music for mythological characters.

What he wanted to do with his music was to move the passions,

to express human emotions,

and he couldn't really do this in the music that these princes wanted

about gods or mythical creatures or dragons.

Monteverdi once said, "How can I imitate the speech of winds?

"Everybody knows that winds don't really talk."

And so in 1643 came the premiere of Monteverdi's new opera,

The Coronation Of Poppea.

For the first time ever in opera, we meet real people

with real passions,

including sexual passions.

After all, the opera was first performed during Venice's

annual carnival season when the city filled up with tourists

looking for decadent thrills.

And Monteverdi's main character was an especially bad boy.

The plot is based on a true story,

the story of the Emperor Nero in the 1st century AD.

This is Nero famous for tyranny and for fiddling while Rome burns.

Specifically it is about the powerful adulterous passion

that Nero feels for his mistress, Poppea.

It's so powerful that it eliminates all obstacles

including Nero's wife and the philosopher Seneca.

Now, Venice was a pretty kinky place, but The Coronation Of Poppea

takes things into a whole new level of kinkiness.

It is completely amoral - at the end, evil triumphs.

But the music is ravishing.

Seneca is ordered to commit suicide

because he disapproves of Nero's passion for Poppea.

And Seneca does.

As you will see, Monteverdi's music still shocks.

One of the gems of this opera is the duet between Nero

and his friend, the poet Lucano.

It starts with the line, "Now that Seneca is dead."

# Or che Seneca e morto... #

And sets up this situation, "What shall we do now he is dead?"

And the answer is...

# Cantiam, cantiam Lucano... #

Cantiam - let's sing.

And in an increasingly drunken frenzy, losing all control,

they sing love songs, invent love songs to Poppea.

Speaking about the different parts of her anatomy.

If the song went on a little bit further,

God knows where they would have arrived.

But it's bawdy enough as it is and it becomes

almost like a singing competition between the two of them.

But it is also very, very sensual, sexy even,

and incredibly erotic and daring for the time.

It's an extraordinary thing - this is how opera began.

You may have noticed that Nero there was played by a female soprano.

Originally the role was sung by a castrato.

Audiences loved the otherworldly voices of these male singers

who had been, well, castrated.

That wasn't the only thing that would have grabbed their attention.

The exciting and innovative thing about it is that it featured

real people from history, people who had once been alive,

albeit a long time ago.

You might not personally particularly identify with

dead Romans, but at the time this was a huge development.

People watching it felt they could share

the emotions of the characters that they saw on stage.

For the first time,

opera was tapping in to contemporary politics and attitudes.

The opera's libretto - that's the story and the words -

were written by Francesco Busenello,

a member of something called the Accademia degli Incogniti -

the Academy of the Unknowns.

This mysterious group of Venetian intellectuals were concerned

with virtue, power, politics.

What is that, Vincenzo, is it a sort of secret society?

The members of the Accademia degli Incogniti

liked to act from behind the scenes,

not overtly, and to influence with their works

and also with opera, the politics of the republic,

have an influence on the audience also of opera.

Why do you think that Busenello chose this particular story?

It's a very strange and dark story, isn't it?

They chose it in order to demonstrate,

to underline the corruption and decadence of the Roman Empire,

because Venice was a republic

and they wanted to show that the Republic of Venice was now

the great heir to the greatness of Roma in antiquity.

The message is, Rome is bad and an empire,

and Venice is good and a republic.

Yes, and the greatness of Roma is in the past

and the greatness of Venice is in the present times.

Venice was a male-dominated society,

and the Incogniti were also worried about women.

Their sexuality could be a dangerous distraction for patriotic citizens,

and Poppea herself is a shameless seductress.

This is a little book showing all the different people

who live in Venice.

And here is my favourite - this lady is the Venetian courtesan.

At first you might be a bit disappointed, you might think,

"There's nothing hot about her."

But the point was their wit and their intelligence.

But then again, if I lift this flap, you will see

what was really for sale.

Yes, it was sex.

Underneath, she was all about greed and self-interest.

In fact, just like Poppea.

In this fascinating love duet,

or shall I call it erotic consecration,

they possess each other.

And the words are intertwining as they are sensual

and the music does exactly the same thing.

Sometimes...

Sometimes being so close, it almost hurts.

This is the power of the sensuality of these two characters.

A fitting finale to what I think is the opera of all operas.

This is the door that opens to all the great duets,

love duets that were to follow.

To make this passion believable, Monteverdi needed singers

who couldn't just sing but also act, make it dramatic.

A trailblazer for today's opera stars like Danielle De Niese

sang in the original production.

Dani, we're looking at a picture of one of your predecessors here.

This is the famous soprano, Anna Renzi.

Anna Renzi. She was rather exalted at the time that she was bringing

these roles to life and Monteverdi was just bringing opera to life.

If we were to describe in a nutshell what

she could do that others couldn't do at the time, she could act.

Do you get any tips from her?

Absolutely.

Poppea is one that everybody thinks is the bad one,

the bad girl, the bad girl who wins.

That's why we go, we go to see the bad girl.

But bad people still fall in love, like Poppea with Nero,

so in her mind, she is doing everything right.

Is there some little phrase, Dani, that you can use to show me

the difference between just performing it straight

and then performing it like an actor?

Well, if I wanted to be a quite cold Poppea

and not imbue any sense of adoring love

or synchronicity really, I would sing it like this.

Ready?

SHE VOCALISES SOFTLY

If I wanted to sort of turn up the heat though,

I could pull you into me and we could sing it like this.

-Hold my hands.

-OK.

-OK.

THEY VOCALISE

Oh, that was sexy.

The great goal theatrically is when you have reeled the public in

so well, it is like the snake has wrapped around them

and they themselves don't know what they have gotten into,

much like Poppea doesn't quite realise in that moment.

Frustratingly, we don't know how the opera was staged

or how it went down with the audience.

This is the only bit of evidence for the first

performance of The Coronation Of Poppea.

It is a diddy little book called the scenario -

we call it the programme - and it was available to the audience

to tell them what was going to happen.

It reveals that at the end of the plot, all of the enemies

of Poppea and Nero have died and that they get together.

Aww.

But the Venetian audience would know what happened next in real history

which is that Poppea got pregnant with Nero's child.

He then kicked her to death before killing himself.

Hmmm.

But Monteverdi and Busenello had created a new form of opera

that appealed not only to people's heads but also to their hearts.

And this is something that would reverberate for centuries to come...

MUSIC: The Marriage Of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

..especially here in Vienna, a century later.

After Monteverdi, opera, particularly Italian opera,

began to catch on all across Europe.

The people who paid for it were largely aristocrats

and the plots of operas by and large supported the social status quo.

But then, in 1786, a brilliant and subversive opera was written here.

For the first time, it gave a voice to ordinary working people.

In lots of ways,

operas were the 18th-century equivalent of blockbuster movies.

Practically every European city had its opera house,

positioned, like this one is, right in the centre of town,

right at the heart of society.

But in opera terms, Vienna was special.

This was Hollywood.

It was a dream factory.

Vienna's opera scene was dominated by Italian composers

like Antonio Salieri.

He was the top musician in town.

Home-grown Austrian composers looked at their Italian rivals with envy.

So it's no surprise that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart couldn't stay away.

He moved to Vienna in 1781 when he was 25.

And, of course, he is still popular here today.

Here in Vienna, Mozart would write his rebellious masterpiece

The Marriage Of Figaro.

But to understand the impact the opera made,

we need to understand Vienna itself.

Time for cake.

Now, no trip to Vienna is complete without a bit of its famous

and fabulous cake.

My cake here is also a history lesson.

The bits in yellow on the map show the extent of the Habsburg Empire

as Mozart knew it.

And right in the middle is where we are, the imperial

capital city of Vienna.

Inside my cake I've got a vertical slice

through imperial Viennese society.

That layer of white icing at the top, that's the nobility.

There aren't many of those, just 3% of the population of 250,000.

The next layer down, the red layer,

these people are the merchants, the manufacturers and the bankers.

They will end up as the powerful middle class.

And beneath them, well, we've got everybody else, the peasants

and the workers.

But this rigid,

almost feudal social order was beginning to break down.

To understand how, we will need to take a look underground.

This crypt is the final resting place

for the Empire's ruling family.

There are 148 Habsburgs in here, including 17 empresses.

This fantastic sarcophagus is the final resting place

of Maria Theresa,

who ruled the Holy Roman Empire for 40 years from 1740 to 1780.

She was the head of the Habsburg Dynasty.

Maria Theresa's best-known child was Marie Antoinette,

the daughter she married into the French royal family.

But among Maria Theresa's other children was her son Joseph

who ruled after her as Emperor Joseph II, and this

is his casket, placed at his request right in front of his mother's.

It's utterly simple, isn't it?

What a contrast.

Joseph II was an enlightened despot.

He tried to head off revolution by conceding some of his power

to his people. He reduced the dominance of his nobility

and introduced liberal reforms, including better education.

And the students here at the University of Vienna still love him.

But in 1780s Vienna, composers still relied on the Emperor's goodwill.

Fortunately, Joseph was a Mozart fan.

And, as a relatively liberal chap,

he allowed Mozart to tell quite a controversial story.

The opera The Marriage Of Figaro is based on a revolutionary play

by a Frenchman, Pierre de Beaumarchais.

The play got banned in France

because its servant characters are just so disrespectful.

And Mozart himself, he'd been fired as court composer

to the Archbishop of Salzburg with, as he put it, "a kick in the arse".

You can see why this play about disobedient servants appealed.

Mozart once wrote a letter saying this,

"I don't need a personage of rank to tell me right and wrong.

"I may not be a count but I probably have in me

"more honour than many a count does.

"It is the heart that ennobles a man."

Now this is very similar to a speech that Figaro makes in the play.

Emperor Joseph allowed Mozart and his librettist

to adapt the play for the Imperial Opera House,

but only if they took out the overtly political bits.

What they came up with, though, was still shockingly radical.

The Countess is the lady of the house.

She is graceful, she is dignified, she is a mature woman

and her tragedy is that she still loves her philandering husband...

..the Count.

He's got a bit of a temper on him, mainly because he is bored

and unhappy.

He no longer has the legal right to sleep

with his young female tenants before they get married

but that doesn't stop him letching after his servants.

Especially pretty, witty Susanna, chambermaid

and confidante to the Countess.

She is brilliant, Susanna, she is clever, she is funny

and she is really cross with the nasty old, gropy old Count.

That is because she is in love with the man she is about to marry...

..Figaro, the Count's valet.

He is a cheeky chappy, a bit of an anarchist and very angry when he

discovers that his master the Count has been after his future wife.

The stage is set.

In Figaro's act one aria, he sings directly to the Count.

And the all-important French horns, the horns the symbol

in operatic music of the cuckold.

Figaro is...

..like this. One minute he is ready to explode,

he comes back and he plots and plans.

"I'm going to use all my powers, all my knavery.

"I'm going to catch him, I'm going to kill him."

This is revolution.

"I'm going to show you, dear little Count, Contino."

And he runs out...

Fantastic.

The Viennese nobility displayed their status through their clothes.

And Mozart, convinced that he was the equal of Vienna's counts,

dressed above his station.

So, Kate, this is a really fabulous coat. How special is it?

It's turquoise velvet with little leopard-skin spots.

Can you imagine Mozart himself wearing a coat like this?

Absolutely. This is a coat somewhat similar to one that would have been

worn by a count.

I think it is just the sort of thing that Mozart would have had to

dress up in in Vienna to fit in.

So it was like a camouflage for him?

He was a servant but he was going to move into the world of the masters?

It definitely gave him the social mobility.

I love the way it has got matching covered buttons.

Mozart was very cunning at working his way through society,

but not without a lot of hard work,

and a lot of talent, genius.

Mozart is kind of bucking the system a bit, isn't he?

He's not so political as to start a revolution in Vienna

but he definitely is aware of the zeitgeist and chose that story

because it really did embody the spirit of the age.

Mozart's Figaro may have been full of all sorts of cunning plans,

but it's his fiancee, the maid Susanna,

who really gets things done.

The Countess dictates a letter to Susanna -

they are going to, together, try to trap the count

and to reveal his amorous intentions towards Susanna.

They trade phrases, Susanna repeats what she hears from the Countess.

And there's an eroticism, trying to create the atmosphere of this

assignation they are going to trap him into.

But at one point, the voices come together and they sing in thirds,

they sing as equals and this is the revelation.

For a servant and her mistress to be singing a duet together

and then further to be singing together as equals,

this is unheard of.

And this is what makes this opera so revolutionary, so modern.

And so provocative.

Before Figaro, servants outwitting their masters

in opera had been comic characters, caricatures really.

But Figaro and Susanna were fully-rounded people

in situations the audience could recognise.

The Marriage Of Figaro's first night on 1 May 1786

aroused strong feelings.

The Emperor liked it.

Mozart's opera fitted in with his agenda to rein in the nobility.

But what about the aristocrats themselves, the real-life counts and countesses?

They had been good patrons to Mozart.

If you look at this list, in 1784, he made three concerts,

subscription concerts.

And it's a list full of princes and counts and barons,

it's unbelievable how many counts subscribed and gave him money.

I can't even count the number of counts in that list, there's loads of them.

Loads of them. And so he could afford to live in an apartment like this one.

And after Figaro?

There's just one name on the list and it was his good friend, Van Swieten.

What effect did that have on his lifestyle?

A huge one.

A half a year later he had to move from this apartment,

first floor, this really beautiful apartment,

he had to move outside of the city wall.

He really screwed up his housing situation then

by mocking the counts of Vienna.

I think he did. I really think he did.

Even if people couldn't afford to go to the opera,

they still got to hear Mozart's big tunes,

because people sang them all over town -

they were smash hits.

It turned out that the ordinary people of Vienna loved Figaro.

Mozart's opera soon spilled out onto the streets.

The tunes were so catchy that even people who hadn't been

to the opera knew how they went.

It is said that Vienna's washerwomen were humming them

as they worked, and in the Empire's second city of Prague, well,

people were singing them on the streets.

# Se vuol ballare, signor contino

# Se vuol ballare, signor contino

# Il chitarrino le suonero... #

Although the social order gets shaken in The Marriage Of Figaro,

it ultimately survives.

The Count says he's sorry, Figaro and Susanna get married,

everyone gets on nicely.

Just two decades later, though,

another opera staged in Vienna called for full-on revolution.

It was written by Mozart's most important successor.

There's a brilliant story that one day in 1787 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

met Ludwig van Beethoven right here in Mozart's house behind me.

Mozart was 31 - he was going to die at 35 -

and Beethoven was just 16, but what a meeting of giants.

And Mozart said to his wife Constanze,

"One day he'll give the world something to talk about."

And he did.

Though Mozart might not have been too pleased, Beethoven later said,

"I couldn't write operas like Don Giovanni or Figaro,

"I have an aversion to them.

"They're too frivolous for me."

Beethoven lived in turbulent times,

and he had a suitably tempestuous personality to match.

Just look at him, pulling his tempestuous face there.

Mozart wrote 22 operas,

Beethoven just the one.

Mozart is supposed to have written Figaro in six weeks,

but Beethoven's single opera, Fidelio, took him 10 painful years.

Fidelio may have been written in Vienna but its roots are in France.

Earth-shattering events here in the 1780s inspired Beethoven's opera.

In 1789, three years after the premiere of Figaro,

the French stormed the prison of the Bastille.

Beethoven was just 18

and he was inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution -

liberty, equality and brotherhood.

After the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI and his family

moved to the palace that once stood in these gardens at the Tuileries.

His Viennese queen, Marie Antoinette, used to walk here.

But then, in 1793, they both met a bloody end on the guillotine

erected just over there in what is now the Place de la Concorde.

The heady early days of the French Revolution

had given way to the Reign Of Terror.

But Beethoven remained committed throughout his life to the ideals

of the early Revolution and he fed them into his opera, Fidelio.

The opera was written after Beethoven suffered

an upheaval of his own.

In 1802, he stayed in this village outside Vienna

and came to a grim conclusion.

"I am deaf," he wrote, admitting it at last.

"I would have put an end to my life - only art withheld me."

The first drafts of Fidelio followed soon after, inspired by a French

craze for operas about prisoners being liberated from tyrants.

Let's meet the characters.

This is Florestan -

he basically spends the whole opera chained to a wall in a dungeon

being starved to death.

Look, here are his manacles.

The mistake he made, although it was a good thing to have done,

was to go up against the corrupt local governor, Don Pizarro.

Here he is with his corrupt-looking eyebrows.

Pizarro had Florestan thrown into the dungeon on trumped-up charges.

But when news started to get out of what had happened to poor Florestan,

Don Pizarro decided to murder him.

Here he comes with his dagger.

But here is the most important person in the whole opera.

This is Florestan's wife, Leonora.

With immense courage, with immense loyalty, with immense fidelity -

hence the opera's name - she tries to rescue her husband.

Now, this is really a story about the French Revolution.

It's a celebration of people who make personal sacrifices

to try to bring down the corrupt state.

It's all an awfully long way away

from the bedroom farce of Figaro, isn't it?

Fidelio brought a whole new dimension to opera.

It showed that serious intellectual

and political arguments could be made through music.

One of the great moments in this opera something called

the Prisoners' Chorus.

They have been allowed out temporarily.

This extraordinary sound world that Beethoven has created

through the text, through the colour of the men's voices

and through achingly beautiful orchestral lines.

It's one of the most extraordinary moments

in the entire repertoire of opera, truly.

Like all other operas, Fidelio had to pass the Austrian censors.

They banned everything with even a whiff of revolution about it,

leaving the poor Viennese on a boring diet of light comedies.

The theatre cleverly argued

that Fidelio was really about womanly virtue.

And it is.

But even that is pretty radical because here,

and it's unusual, the female character takes the lead.

Leonora is a post-Revolutionary heroine.

She starts off motivated by love for her husband

but she ends up more generally on the side of all the oppressed.

Admittedly she spends the whole opera cross-dressing

and pretending to be a man, but Beethoven is making it clear

that he thinks that women in operas can do more than just die

tragically, as sopranos had tended to do in serious operas before now.

In one key scene, Leonora draws a pistol on the corrupt governor.

There may be tears in her eyes, but there's a gun in her hand.

Beethoven had idolised Napoleon,

and hoped that he'd revive the Revolution's early ideals.

But Beethoven thought the power had gone to Napoleon's head

and that he had become just another tyrant.

It's pretty well known that Beethoven, here in Vienna,

went off Napoleon after Napoleon crowned himself as Emperor.

By 1805, when the first performance of Fidelio was scheduled,

Napoleon's revolutionary armies were surging across Europe,

they were deep into Habsburg territory.

The decisive battle took place here at Ulm in modern Germany.

There was now nothing between Napoleon and Vienna.

SHE IMITATES GALLOPING

Fidelio's premiere was planned for November 1805,

here at the Theater An Der Wien,

an opera house.

But one week before it happened, Napoleon's army occupied Vienna.

All the wealthy operagoers fled from the city

and everyone else stayed indoors.

Beethoven's former hero had managed to ruin Beethoven's big night.

I can't imagine that that went down well.

The few people who did come were French army officers

wanting a bit of relaxation.

At least the French officers liked the bit about the release

of the prisoners, that reminded them of the fall of the Bastille.

But as an invading, occupying force, they must have felt that they

were being cast in the role of the unjust and tyrannical governor.

Not surprisingly, Fidelio was a flop.

It got dropped after just three nights.

You can understand why the French said "non".

At the end of the opera, the villain Pizarro gets executed

and the lovers are reunited.

As Leonora and Florestan are reunited,

Beethoven launches an extraordinary duet.

He launches into something feverish.

"Oh, joy beyond words."

And that how they sing, trading phrases, trading phrases to come

together to stop the activity and sing about the unspeakable pain

and sufferings that they have had to endure to get to this point.

Such beautiful harmony.

And then they're off again and in their joy they say,

"Is it really you? Is it?"

Very, very touching and simple, and yet totally real.

Beethoven said that of all his works,

Fidelio had brought him the most sorrow,

and for that reason, was the one most dear to him.

A decade later it was performed in Vienna again, in 1814,

in the old Imperial Opera House.

By this time, poor Beethoven was profoundly deaf.

But timing is everything.

This time round, Fidelio was an utter triumph.

By now, the French armies had suffered

a series of catastrophic defeats

and the performance of Fidelio took place the very night

before the leaders of Europe sat down for a peace

conference here in Vienna, the Congress of Vienna.

They loved the opera's message about resisting tyranny.

And throughout the centuries,

Fidelio has remained a celebration of freedom.

In 2004, it was performed in the South African prison

whose most famous inmate had been Nelson Mandela.

As Beethoven said, "This opera will win me a martyr's crown."

He was right.

His sheer bloody-mindedness had paid off in the end.

A quarter of a century later, in the northern Italian city of Milan,

an opera was performed which reflected the hopes

and dreams of a whole people, as they struggled towards nationhood.

In the early 19th century,

what we now call Italy wasn't yet an actual country -

it was just a loose grouping of little states,

with not much more to unite them than a language and a religion,

and an idea that maybe they ought to get together.

There was that and a growing dislike of the Austrians

who held sway over their peninsula.

The Italians needed someone or something to pull them

all together, and in their time of crisis, they turned to opera.

Along came the perfect composer,

but first he had to go through a crisis of his own.

Our composer's tragic tale made him

the ideal man to capture his country's mood.

In 1838, his infant daughter died.

A year later, he lost his little son.

And the next year, his wife.

Our grieving composer was handed a new libretto for an opera.

Would he write the music?

"No", the composer said.

He couldn't bear to think about work.

He threw this libretto across the room

and it fell open at a certain page

and his eye fell on certain words, which were,

"Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate."

Fly away, thought, on wings of gold.

Then he went to bed.

But it was too late - those words had gone into his brain.

The composer was this man, Giuseppe Verdi,

and the chorus, Va, pensiero,

would be the centrepiece of his opera Nabucco,

based on a biblical tale.

This is the Israelites in exile in Babylon

and they long for their homeland.

It's a song of the people.

Verdi, he has the chorus singing in unison.

You'll notice there's a sorrow in that, there's an entreaty

but there's also defiance.

This alternating between loud, very loud,

and very, very soft is tremendously theatrical, of course.

Although it's a collective mass,

there's something that speaks to the individual in us,

the desire for freedom, the desire for peace, for happiness.

And here is Nabucco himself from a contemporary production,

wearing rather a fetching apron.

He is a baddie.

He's king of the Babylonians, he's destroyed the temple in Jerusalem,

and he's enslaved the Israelites.

Now, for the Italians in the 1840s, a story about a foreign king

and enslavement, this was a story that really resonated.

Nabucco's premiere was here at La Scala opera house in Milan.

The Austrian censors didn't see any problem with Nabucco -

it was just an old Bible story, wasn't it?

But the first audience on 9 March 1842 found the opera

as emotionally powerful as it had been for Verdi himself.

Verdi doing his conducting just down there was an amazing sight.

It was said that he conducted as if his life depended on it.

One person who saw him

describes how he would let out shouts like a desperate man,

he would pedal with his feet as if he were playing the organ

and he would also sweat all over the score.

And Nabucco was a total triumph.

The chorus, Va, pensiero, that brought Verdi back from

the brink of despair, well, that got tumultuous applause.

Over the next year, Nabucco had a record-breaking run at La Scala.

The Austrian authorities eventually caught on

that part of the attraction was that it was political.

The police were quite right to be quite worried about Nabucco.

All the people who had been to see it, all these would-be Italians,

well, they took away the message that a nation can be freed.

In Verdi's version of the story, Nabucco gets cursed by God

and he goes mad, then he sings a really lovely and moving aria

where he begs for forgiveness for having enslaved the Israelites.

His prayers are answered, his madness is lifted,

and he frees his captives.

Pulling on the heartstrings of the audience, obviously,

and seeing this immense

and powerful character being reduced

to someone asking for forgiveness.

Verdi does this brilliantly.

He's finding himself with every opera,

there's a new way of trying to express the personal...

..trying to make the characters on stage, whether they be kings

or they be courtesans, as definable as possible as human beings.

But of course it takes a great performer to pull this off.

It doesn't just happen.

After Nabucco, Verdi became a passionate supporter

of the movement for Italian reunification.

When an uprising in Milan in 1848 drove out the Austrians,

he was ecstatic.

"Honour to all Italy," he wrote.

"The hour of her liberation has sounded."

Verdi got a bit carried away there -

it took until 1871 for Italy finally to become a single country.

Verdi himself became a national hero

and a member of Italy's first Parliament.

And Va, pensiero became Italy's unofficial national anthem.

He died in Milan in 1901 after a long composing career,

and he is buried in this crypt.

Verdi was always rather grumpy about his own astronomical success.

For his funeral he requested something very simple,

just one priest, just one carriage.

But a month later, his body was moved here

and for this final journey, 300,000 people turned up to see him off -

that's half the population of Milan.

And when the procession arrived, a chorus of 800 sang Va, pensiero.

Va, pensiero is a brilliant example of how a song,

just a song, can become a mirror for a generation,

reflecting its hopes and dreams.

This building is now a retirement home for musicians

and singers who still find passion and meaning in Verdi's music.

# Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate

# Va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli

# Ove olezzano tepide e molli... #

Next time, I'll visit France and Germany to look at

a new kind of opera that took off in the middle of the 19th century.

It delved even deeper into people's private desires

for freedom, identity and sex.

# ..al patire virtu. #

APPLAUSE