Certain composers seem to dominate particular kinds of music. Beethoven’s symphonies and Bach’s church music, for instance, are the standard against which everything written since has been measured. Similarly, the operas of Italian Giuseppe Verdi are often considered the greatest ever written. Along with the operas written by Mozart, Giacomo Puccini, Gioacchino Rossini and others, they make up what is called the “Standard Repertoire”, a group of operas that nearly every opera company in the world draws upon when determining what to produce.

 

Verdi lived in a very troubled time in Italy, when people there were trying to form the area into one solid, stable nation, rather a loosely defined collection of states. Verdi’s music became popular as an emblem of this movement, and sometimes people would use his name or pieces of his lyrics as code to transport messages around the country. His song “Va, Pensiero” (or “Fly, Thought”) is often considered the unofficial Italian national anthem.