Temistocle Solera

Temistocle Solera was an Italian poet and opera librettist, best known for writing the librettos of Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco and I Lombardi alla prima crociata.

Nabucco: An 1842 opera by Giuseppe Verdi about the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and the Hebrew people. Solera’s libretto for this opera helped establish his lasting association with Verdi.
Opera: A form of musical drama in which singers perform a staged story with instrumental accompaniment. Solera’s writing was created for this combined theatrical and musical form.
Bartolomeo Merelli: An Italian opera impresario and librettist who managed La Scala during Verdi’s early career. Merelli commissioned and supported works that brought Solera and Verdi together.
Italian Risorgimento: The nineteenth-century movement that led to the unification of Italy in 1861. The national themes associated with Nabucco made Solera’s work part of Risorgimento-era cultural debate.
Va, pensiero: A chorus of Hebrew exiles in Verdi’s Nabucco, often called the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. The chorus sets Solera’s words in the passage most strongly associated with Nabucco’s later public meaning.
I Lombardi alla prima crociata: An 1843 opera by Giuseppe Verdi about Lombard crusaders traveling to the Holy Land. Solera wrote the libretto for this early collaboration with Verdi.
Libretto: The text of an opera, oratorio, or other vocal work set to music. Solera wrote the words that Verdi shaped into operatic music.
Antonio Piazza: An Italian playwright and librettist whose drama served as the basis for Verdi’s Nabucco. Piazza’s play was an earlier source behind the story Solera adapted for Nabucco.
Romanticism: An artistic and intellectual movement that emphasized emotion, imagination, nature, and historical memory. Solera’s dramatic poetry belongs to the Romantic-era interest in intense feeling and history.
Risorgimento nationalism: Italian nationalist ideas and activism associated with the movement for national unification. Audiences later connected Nabucco’s themes of exile and homeland with Italian national feeling.

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Antonio GhislanzoniRelated: Solera’s earlier collaborations with Verdi provide a comparison for Ghislanzoni’s role.