This is one of Tosti's most famous compositions, and it displays all of the characteristics we associate with him—a dreamy sentimentality, smooth, caressing phrases, pleasing melody, and a delicate melancholy. While Tosti was capable of writing more passionate music (such as Non t'amo piu), he prefered to make his emotional expression lyrical and relatively small scale, rather than dramatic. The singer describes in romantic terms how he followed an ideal, whether a woman or something more abstract, and begs the ideal to return, "and in your image, a new dawn will shine upon me." The lines are flowing and rich, occasionally rising in yearning, but mostly in the rich middle registers of the voice.

© Anne Feeney, Rovi