Ebben? Ne andrò lontana (La Wally)

Wally has been ordered by her father to marry a man she does not love, and the aria is her answer: she will go far away, into the snow, and not come back. Catalani wrote La Wally in 1892, the year before he died at thirty-nine, and it was his only lasting success — Toscanini admired it enough to name his daughter after the heroine. The aria left the opera behind and became a concert piece, then a film one, and is now better known than the work it comes from.