Music, by definition, tells its own story. I am simply accompanying it here with a bit of history. Indeed, I do not play Verdi at all on this album. To set out what this is about, I refer you to an intervention by the famous Italian conductor Riccardo Muti at the Rome opera, which inspired this record, and which I encourage you to watch; it is fairly easy to find the excerpt online. “Viva Verdi” is a phrase with a double meaning, because while it means what it means, it is also an acrostic dear to the Italian revolutionaries of the early nineteenth century: Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia. Far from any idea of French-style royalism, it was the rallying cry of the Garibaldians for a unified and sovereign Italy. The slaves’ chorus is a bit our equivalent of Le Temps des Cerises, and Verdi is an icon of Italian culture much like Victor Hugo in France; he is the “national composer.” I will not dwell on the diffuse pain of being Italian today. As a representative of a certain idea of my country’s culture in the world, I chose, along with my compatriots working on this project, to live abroad (Gianluca Renzi, double bassist and arranger, lives in New York, Lorenzo Pagliei, conductor, and myself in Paris). This record was conceived between Europe and the United States, and recorded “one shot” in Seoul. After twenty years of voluntary exile, I borrow from the illustrious ancestor “his golden wings,” and pay tribute to what may no longer be, but what made us what we are. Giovanni Mirabassi