Ex. 8-7: In solitaria stanza

"In solitaria stanza" (In a Solitary Room) is the third of six songs by Giuseppe Verdi, published together in 1838 as Sei romanze (Six Romances). It was the first music Verdi ever published. The words are by the Italian poet Jacopo Vittorelli.

The poem is about a man who prays for a sick young woman named Irene and begs the gods to save her. In the music, the piano plays steady triplets from the beginning to the end.

Verdi was an unknown musician in his mid-twenties when he wrote it, years before his first opera. Fifteen years later, in 1853, he wrote the opera Il Trovatore, and one of its famous arias — Leonora's "D'amor sull'ali rosee" (On the Rosy Wings of Love) — has a melody much like this song.

When Verdi wrote these songs, he was the town music director in Busseto, a small town in northern Italy. In 1836 he had married Margherita Barezzi, the daughter of Antonio Barezzi, the merchant who had paid for his music studies. They had two small children. But in 1838, the same year the songs came out, their baby daughter died. Their son died the next year, and Margherita died in 1840. Within about two years Verdi lost his wife and both of their children.

Two of the other songs in the set use Italian translations of Goethe's Faust, made for Verdi by his friend Luigi Balestra, a doctor in Busseto.

From the album Verdi: Songs by Margaret Price and Geoffrey Parsons (1987)
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