Hymn of the Nations

If Benito Mussolini had dialed in on NBC's short wave lengths last week, he might have heard Italy's greatest conductor direct some uncomfortably prophetic music by Italy's greatest composer. On Arturo Toscanini's Sunday afternoon broadcast, the Westminster Choir boomed cheerfully (in Italian) these words from Giuseppe Verdi's Hymn of the Nations:

Hail, England, Mistress of the Seas,

Hail emblem of liberty,

Oh France, who shed your blood for a land enslaved,

Hail!

Oh, Italy betrayed*

May merciful heaven watch over you,

Until that day when free again,

You stand upright in the sun.

Verdi wrote it for an international shindig in London in 1862, when part of Italy was still under the Austrian heel, and he always considered it a musical indiscretion. But Toscanini, who has scrupulously avoided any truck with Fascism, found Verdi's Garibaldian sentiments too appropriate to neglect.

* To make his point even more emphatic, Conductor Toscanini changed Verdi's Italia, patria mia (Italy, my country) to Italia tradita (Italy betrayed).

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