For Giuseppe Verdi ‘the song had about the same significance that the sketch has for the painter’. It gave him the opportunity ‘to sketch emotions and characters in a smaller, more improvised form, genre pictures of passions and destinies he otherwise placed in the wide space of the stage’.

Hence, his songs are, as it were, the forerunners of his theatre music, ‘they also possess the clout of characterization, the magnificent objectivity of portrayal we admire in the opera arias’ (W Oehlmann).

After his successful album with opera arias (C5165), the famous tenor Ramón Vargas takes care of these beautiful miniatures from the world famous Italian opera composer.