Il tramonto (first version)
Enrique Guzmán and Will Crutchfield
The 1858 anthology of poems by Verdi’s great friend Andrea Maffei contains a poem in four quatrains that, it appears from correspondence, he wrote specifically for Verdi’s use. All four quatrains had appeared in 1845, over a dozen years earlier, in the song “Il tramonto” from the composer’s second collection of Six Romances. But in the same year, on June 1, Verdi signed a setting of just the first two verses, presumably as a gift or “album leaf” for some friend or dignitary. The autograph is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.
We are calling this the “first version” of the song, simply because it begins with a simpler and more primitive-sounding accompaniment than the published one. But in fact we do not know for certain which one came first - and once past the opening lines, they are not really “versions” of each other, but two independent songs that begin in more or less the same way. The present setting is in a somewhat more florid “bel canto” style, and as far as we are aware it has not been recorded before.
Amo l'ora del giorno che muore
Quando il sole già stanco declina,
E nell'onde di queta marina
Veggo il raggio supremo languir.
In quell'ora mi torna nel core
Un' età più felice di questa,
In quell' ora dolcissima e mesta
Volgo a te, cara donna, il sospir.
I love the hour of day’s dying,
when the tired sun descends,
and in the still waters of the marina
I see the last rays languishing.
In that hour, there returns to my heart
a happier age than this one;
in that sweet and sad hour,
I turn my sighs, dear woman, to you!