Cupo è il sepolcro e mutolo
Geoffrey Loff and Hans Tashjian
This is a song that remained unpublished in Verdi’s lifetime. The autograph manuscript bears the inscription “To Count Lodovico Belgiojoso, in token of esteem, G. Verdi, Milan, 7 July 1843,” and the composer may not even have retained a copy of the music.
Verdi was at that moment basking in the clamorous success of his third and fourth operas - Nabucco and I Lombardi - and preparing a fifth that would prove even more durable, Ernani. The dedicatee - Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso d'Este, to give his full name - was a young nobleman who offered patronage to musicians, writers, artists -- and the revolutionary patriots of what would become the Italian Risorgimento. He was born in 1814 into a family already prominent enough in the 14th century to earn an honorable mention in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and died in 1880.
Count Lodovico Belgiojoso with his wife Amalia, around 1852. After a watercolor by Antonio Bignoli
The family was noted for musical accomplishment; Liszt, in a tribute to Italy’s noble amateurs, commented that “all the Poniatowskis, like all the Belgiojosos, sing and sing well.” (Lodovico’s brother Pompeo had been the bass soloist in the Bologna premiere of Rossini’s Stabat Mater just a year before Verdi’s song was written.)
The text is derived from a German poem, Das Grab by Johann Gaudenz von Salis-Seewis, which had already been set to music by Schubert and several other composers. The Italian translation is by Cesare Cantù, an incredibly productive historian, poet, novelist, critic, translator, and patriot whose works, over the span of his 90-year life, included books on Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, a history of the world in seventy-two volumes, and a novel written on rags with a tooth-pick and candle smoke while he was imprisoned for his anti-Austrian sympathies in the 1830s.
Cupo è il sepolcro e mutolo;
Tema il suo margo infonde:
Una regione incognita
In fosco vel nasconde.
Tace là dentro il cantico
Dell'ussignol : le rose
Dell'amistà non toccano,
Che le sue zolle erbose.
Invan l’afflitta vedova
Il seno, il crin si offende:
Dell’orfanella il gemito
Al fondo suo non scende.
Pure ivi è sol la stabile
Calma, che l’uom desia:
Guida alla vera patria
Sol quella cupa via.
Povero cuor! Dai turbini
Sommosso ognor quaggiù,
Solo ritrova requie
Quando non batte più.
The grave is dark and silent;
its border fills us with fear;
An unknown land
lies hidden beneath its dark veil.
There falls silent the song
of the nightingale;
the roses of friendship fall
on its mossy banks.
In vain the mourning widdow
tears at her hair and breast;
the cry of the orphan
does not reach to its depths.
And yet there alone
is the calm for which man yearns:
Only that dark path
leads to the true homeland.
Poor heart! whipped by the
whirlwinds here above,
it finds its peace only
when it beats no more.