Serenata

Tosti set a poem by the Sicilian writer Giovanni Alfredo Cesareo, published in 1888, in which the singer asks the night wind to carry his song to a sleeping woman. The accompaniment keeps up a steady guitar-like figure throughout, the convention of the serenade, while the vocal line climbs in successive waves. By this date Tosti had settled in London, where he taught the daughters of Queen Victoria and became a fixture of the salon circuit; he took British nationality in 1906.