The recent splendid performance of Nabucco at the Astra Opera House in Victoria shows how Gozo has developed an irresistible passion for music, fully deserving to be called Malta’s cultural city.

The Astra Musical Society deserves praise for an outstanding performance. All the cast, the National Orchestra, the artistic director and the choir rose to the occasion.

I particularly admired the soprano role of Abigaille, a legendary exacting role which had sounded the death-knell of many famous divas.

Without doubt, music director Joseph Vella has entered a realm where very few conductors attempt to follow.

His fine reputation has come full circle since his painstaking academic work in the 1970s with the revival of the sublime 17th century baroque music that had languished unknown for centuries in the damp cellars of the Mdina Cathedral Museum.

One of the most famous choruses ‘Va pensiero’ representing the plight of the exiled Jews by the banks of the Euphrates longing for their homeland is the best known number of this opera and is almost always given an encore in many opera houses.

By sheer coincidence, a marginal note scribbled by a Vittoriosa notary on September 7, 1565, at 11pm – recently discovered at the Notarial Archives – refers to the singing of hymns of joy as a besieged Vittoriosa heard the news of the Grande Soccorso, with the notary comparing their delivery to the joyous singing of the Israelites’ release from captivity.

This year, the 450th anniversary of the Great Siege, this exquisite chorus assumes a bigger significance and the notarial note deserves to be written in letters of gold.