Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry: Eros, Tragedy, and National Identity [1st ed.] 9783030460907, 9783030460914

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ITALIAN AND ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry Eros, Tragedy, and National Identity Mattia Acetoso

Italian and Italian American Studies Series Editor Stanislao G. Pugliese Hofstra University Hempstead, NY, USA

This series brings the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. Featuring works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices, it has been a longstanding force in shaping the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by re-emphasizing their connection to one another. Editorial Board Rebecca West, University of Chicago Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University Fred Gardaphé, Queens College, CUNY Phillip V. Cannistraro†, Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY Alessandro Portelli, Università di Roma “La Sapienza” William J. Connell, Seton Hall University More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14835

Mattia Acetoso

Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry Eros, Tragedy, and National Identity

Mattia Acetoso Boston College Boston, MA, USA

Italian and Italian American Studies ISBN 978-3-030-46090-7    ISBN 978-3-030-46091-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46091-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In loving memory of Raffaella, Claudia, Licia, and all my “care ombre.”

Acknowledgments

This book brings to completion a research project that began with my doctoral dissertation. No part of this work would have been possible without the generous help of mentors, friends, and colleagues, and I would like to take the opportunity to thank them all. My gratitude goes first and foremost to my teachers, who encouraged the first steps of this project and continue to guide my career: in particular Giuseppe Mazzotta, my thesis advisor and a model of intellectual excellence. I owe greatly to his guidance and advice. Millicent Marcus has been a pillar of my academic career: I am constantly inspired by her intellect, her grace, and her enthusiasm. I would like to thank Arielle Saiber and Barry McCrea, for their mentorship and for inspiring my career early on, as well as Joseph Luzzi, for his friendship and support, in particular during the publication of this book. My warmest thoughts go to all the friends in the Yale Italian Department, among them Ann DeLauro, Giuseppe Gazzola, Griffin Oleynick, Christopher Nixon, Karen Raizen, Luca Peretti, and Diego Bertelli. Special thanks to Andrea Moudarres, for his unreplaceable advising, and Toby Levers, for his unmatched editing skills. I am especially thankful to my colleagues and friends in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Boston College, who help create a space of personal and intellectual growth. My gratitude goes in particular to Franco Mormando, for his leadership, advising, and intellectual generosity, and Laurie Shepard, whose intellectual curiosity and scholarly voracity never cease to amaze and inspire me. I would also like to thank all colleagues, whose company and advising I am lucky to enjoy on a daily vii

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basis, among them Wan Sonya Tang, Daniel Bowles, Brian O’Connor, Regine Jean-Charles, Elizabeth Rhodes, Liesl Yamaguchi, Thomas Oboe Lee, Francesco Castellano, Kevin Newmark, Stephen Bold, Sarah Beckjord, Irene Mizrahi, Christian Dupont, and Jeremiah McGrann. Special thanks to all my students, for giving me the energy and motivation to continue on my academic path with enthusiasm and joy. Ultimately, I could not have completed any of this work without the precious and unreplaceable support of my wife Liz, who brings me joy and makes everything possible. I am also immensely grateful to my parents and my sister, not only for their love and encouragement, but also for the lightness they bring into my life. I would like to thank Sylvia Poggioli, for her friendship and her support throughout the years, and a special thanks to teachers, mentors, and friends dispersed around the country and across the ocean: Risa Sodi, Mary Ann Carolan, David Lummus, Alberto Bertoni, Alessandro Niero, Edgardo Saronne, Patrizio Ceccagnoli, Renato Camurri, Alberto Beniscelli, and Roberto Deidier. Finally, I would like to thank all family and friends I could not mention, but whose presence shines in my life and gives meaning to my work. The core of this book was originally my dissertation, entitled In Two Voices: Opera, Melodrama, and Music in Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale (Yale University, 2012). An early version of Chap. 3 was published as a journal article, “Come un fulgore azzurro: Umberto Saba and the Verdian Sound of Italy,” California Italian Studies 4.1 (2013): 1–21. I would like to thank the editors of the journal for their permission to reprint this essay. Finally, I am very grateful to Stan Pugliese, for supporting the publication of this book, and to the staff at Palgrave Macmillan for helping me bring this project to completion.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 A Eulogy for Italian Opera  1 1.2 Opera and Poetry  6 1.3 Modern Poet-Librettists  8 1.4 Pascoli 10 1.5 Gozzano 12 1.6 Critical Assessments 14 1.7 Chapter Summaries 16 References 29 2 From Bayreuth to Fiume: D’Annunzio, Wagner, and the Death of Italian Opera 33 2.1 D’Annunzio and Opera 33 2.2 Opera Verista 35 2.3 Music and Words 38 2.4 Wagner 41 2.5 Nietzsche and Wagner 44 2.6 D’Annunzio’s Dream: The “Teatro di Festa” and the “Total Work of Art” 46 2.7 Musical Epilogue 53 References 67

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3 Umberto Saba and the Verdian Sound of Italy 71 3.1 Civic Library 71 3.2 Carmen and Verdi 75 3.3 Trieste 78 3.4 Overthrowing the Father 82 References 99 4 More Than Words: Ossi di seppia, Opera, and the Miracle of Counter-Eloquence103 4.1 Montale the Baritone103 4.2 Echoes of Opera107 4.3 More Than Words115 4.4 Music of the Heart120 4.5 Language of Counter-Eloquence127 References142 5 Heart of Darkness: Saba’s Operatic Eroticism145 5.1 Opera and the Erotic145 5.2 Eros and Thanatos147 5.3 Love, Libido, Don Juan151 5.4 Preludes, Canzonettas, and Fugues157 References180 6 Strange Mercy: Montale, Opera, and the Death of Tragedy183 6.1 The Storm and Other Prisons183 6.2 The Storm of History184 6.3 The Prison of Poetry190 6.4 After the Storm194 6.5 Temporary Conclusions197 References212 7 Poetry and the Beast: Giorgio Caproni’s Simulations of Opera215 7.1 A Musical Education215 7.2 The Crisis of Language217

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7.3 A Desire for Theater221 7.4 The Hunt226 7.5 The Beast229 References243 8 Conclusions245 Bibliography247 Index265

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1   A Eulogy for Italian Opera On November 29, 1924, Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924)—composer of world-renowned operas and heir to a long tradition of Italian masters— died, leaving his final work incomplete. This opera, Turandot, portrays the turbulent romance between a reluctant Chinese princess and her suitor, Prince Calaf, who must solve three riddles to win her hand. Upon Puccini’s death, another composer, Franco Alfano (1875–1954), completed the score, but when Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957) conducted the première of Turandot he decided to remain faithful to the original, ignoring the posthumous modifications and stopping abruptly at the point where Puccini had ceased to write. This performance, at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala (April 25, 1926), acquired a secondary significance in light of the composer’s death. William Weaver, renowned critic and translator of dozens of Italian masterpieces, vividly described that evening and underscored what Toscanini’s gesture came to symbolize for the history of Italian opera: On that opening night at La Scala, Alfano’s careful patchwork was not heard. Before the glittering audience . . . as he reached the conclusion of Liù’s death scene, Toscanini laid down his baton and said, in effect . . . ‘The opera ends here, because at this point the Maestro died. Death was stronger than art.’ The opera ends here. Toscanini might have been speaking not just of Puccini’s last work but of Italian opera in general.1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Acetoso, Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46091-4_1

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Toscanini, that is, presided over the funeral of what Weaver defined as the “Golden Age” of Italian opera, a period that spans from Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) to Puccini himself, in which opera had become nearly synonymous throughout the world with Italian culture. As the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) put it, to Russian ears the sound of the Italian language was indistinguishable from the sounds of opera.2 The association is not undeserved. The beginnings of opera are rooted in the experimentations of a group of Italian scholars, artists, and scientists—the Camerata de’ Bardi (or the Florentine Camerata)—who in late sixteenth-century Florence endeavored to create a new art form that would unite others (music, poetry, theater, and dance) in an attempt to revive ancient Greek tragedy.3 A few decades on, opera had become a popular form of entertainment in Venice, where the first theaters were built and the genre began to evolve from private court performances into an ever larger commercial enterprise, accessible to ever wider audiences.4 In the centuries that followed, opera’s connection to Italy became solidified as it grew into the peninsula’s most recognizable genre, one that synthesized both the region’s genius and its many contradictions. Musicologist Aldo Nicastro has argued that even before Italy’s political unification, opera and the cultural currency it carried anticipated the idea of an Italian nation.5 Music critic Bruno Barilli has added to this thesis by focusing on Giuseppe Verdi and his hometown Parma, highlighting the extent to which opera was embedded in the city’s social fabric. In Barilli’s book, Il paese del melodramma, the word “paese” initially denotes the “town” of Parma, but the word can also mean “country,” and indeed comes to signify the Italian nation itself, whose iconic sound was the music of its operas.6 William Ashbrook and Harold Powers, in reflecting on Weaver’s account of Turandot’s premiere, concur that Puccini’s death marked the endpoint of the most successful period of Italian opera, but disagree that this meant the death of the genre itself.7 Many other composers, of course, were active after Puccini, and operas continue to this day to be written and performed across the world. But what vanished with Puccini’s death was opera’s cultural supremacy, the art form’s power to faithfully embody the character of a whole country. From that moment on, the prominence of opera as a major form of popular entertainment began to fade. Italian opera became an elitist genre in the works of new composers, while at the same time regressing into nostalgic re-enactments of past masterpieces for the enjoyment of connoisseurs and tourists. In sum, the high drama that surrounded Turandot’s premiere was eminently appropriate in hindsight.

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The “death” of Italian opera was, however, a long process that in truth had begun years before. Scholars have debated the details of this decline. In Barilli’s view, it began with the death of Verdi and the de-­popularization of the genre.8 David Kimbell, on the other hand, points to the effects of cosmopolitanism on Italian music in the early twentieth century.9 Kimbell, too, underscores the national character of the genre, but argues that it in turn succumbed under the pressure of other national traditions, resulting in a general desire for experimentation by new composers, eager to look abroad for inspiration.10 Mindful of Kimbell’s analysis, Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol reflects on the role played by the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century.11 The Italian Futurists, in their fervor to revolutionize all art, played a crucial role in casting doubt on the dignity and the intellectual value of Italian opera. In their first “Manifesto del Futurismo” (1909), they outlined their program for the destruction of museums, libraries, and academies.12 They cast these institutions as empty vestiges of a past that Italy had to leave behind in order to progress artistically and (in their view) morally. From such a viewpoint, Italian opera was an obvious target, thought of as a collection of “museum pieces” that ought to be done away with.13 Although the Futurists generally attacked all forms of convention in music,14 what they disliked about opera in particular was the cheap appeal to emotion: using triteness and cliché for popular appeal, using recycled themes and tropes to wring out formulaic emotional responses. The best-­ known Futurist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), famously attacked the sentimentalism he felt had saturated Italian lyric poetry. In his early essay “Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna” (“Kill the Moonlight,” 1909), Marinetti urges his fellow “incendiary” poets to replace the worn-out conventions of contemporary poetry with accounts and commemorations of acts of fearless heroism. Composer and musicologist Francesco Balilla Pratella (1880–1955), in his “Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi” (“Manifesto of Futurist Musicians,” 1910), referred to opera librettos as “fetid cakes” and called Italian “melodramma” a “pesante e soffocante gozzo della nazione” (“heavy and suffocating crop of our country”). He derided the lack of innovation of contemporary Italian opera, in particular the “base, rickety, and vulgar operas of Giacomo Puccini.”15 The Futurist assault on Italian opera did not come only in the form of loud outcries in their manifestos—it also found its way into Futurist poetry. Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974), a Futurist in his younger years and the author of several books of poetry, published a poem in 1909 that evinces the Futurist distaste for opera:

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Son forse un poeta? No, certo. Non scrive che una parola, ben strana, la penna dell’anima mia: “follia”. (“Chi sono,” 1–5)16

A response to Sergio Corazzini’s poem “Desolazione del povero poeta sentimentale” (“Desolation of the Sentimental Poet,” 1906), Palazzeschi’s “Chi sono” mocks lyric poetry’s overindulgence in saccharine emotions. Palazzeschi counters the humble tone adopted by the Crepuscular Poets (poeti crepuscolari) as a reaction against the grandiose rhetoric of their poetic predecessors (e.g. Carducci and D’Annunzio).17 Palazzeschi attacks the Crepusculars’ lack of vigor by channeling the language of opera: he echoes one of the most recognizable moments from Puccini’s La Bohème (1896), an iconic story of a group of artists in 1830s Paris. In the opera’s first act, the poet Rodolfo confesses his love to the beautiful Mimì in one of the best-known arias of Italian opera, “Che gelida manina”: Chi son? Sono un poeta. Che cosa faccio? Scrivo. E come vivo? Vivo. (La Bohème, I)

Palazzeschi (who later in life would renounce the radical positions of his Futurist youth) here aims his satire at Rodolfo’s maudlin introduction, and in so doing his mockery penetrates the very essence of Italian opera, thus encapsulating the Futurist condemnation of sentimentalism. The Futurist fascination with speed and machinery seemed naturally at odds with the slow pace and lyrical protraction of opera.18 In their calls to counteract the backwardness they perceived in Italian culture, the Futurists favored new art forms better suited to their vision of a technological era, most notably the new genre of cinema. When the “Golden Century of Italian Opera” (to borrow Weaver’s phrase) came to an end, the film industry began to take over opera’s role as Italy’s primary form of popular art. This transition was gradual and involved a great deal of borrowing: for Ashbrook and Powers, the spirit of Italian opera pervades the films of D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille and reaches even modern filmmakers like Dino de Laurentiis and Franco Zeffirelli.19 As Guarnieri Corazzol points out,20 even Puccini’s Turandot itself seems to channel

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the techniques of film editing with its fast-paced first act.21 But what scholars have largely failed to explore is that in the midst of this transition there was another crucial recipient of the fading artistic and intellectual legacy of opera: twentieth-century Italian poetry, in which opera is a recurring presence. In saying this I do not mean the kind of opera-parody that we see in Palazzeschi, though this could be included as one category of the wider field of allusions, borrowings, and echoes with which this book is concerned. In the chapters that follow, I will also highlight more dispassionate poetic reactions to opera—for example, attempts to reproduce its musical elements in writing (the overlapping of voices in imitation of polyphony or the use of operatic meter and rhyme scheme). More often, however, my focus lies on the poetic evocation of operatic images— not just references to lines in librettos but also the conjuring of visual and conceptual motifs that come out of widely loved operas. Analyzing key instances of such evocation and situating them in the context of their historical moments, contemporary intellectual trends, and artistic precedents (both poetic and operatic), I aim to identify and connect the varied motivations for operatic references by four key twentieth-century poets: Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), Umberto Saba (1883–1957), Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), and Giorgio Caproni (1912–1990).22 D’Annunzio harbored a hostility toward contemporary opera that inspired his desire for a new art form that would better merge literature, theater, and music. Saba, on the other hand, found in opera a special means of expression—with Verdi’s operas in particular he was able to articulate his complex nationalism as well as his conflicted sexuality. Montale looked to opera librettos for a language of counter-eloquence that might overcome the magniloquence of the previous poetic generation. He also used opera to articulate his pessimism about the diminished role of poetry in contemporary society and ultimately to overcome that pessimism by finding a way to reconnect with the ancient form of tragedy and to apply that form to the modern era. Caproni explored a unique theatrical mode for his own poetry, influenced and inspired by predecessors and demonstrating an ambition to use opera to overcome the limitations of lyric expression. Importantly, all four of these authors aspired to become musicians, and writing was for them, to some degree, a compensation for a failed career in music. In different ways, they each turned these frustrated musical aspirations into an operatic thematics within their poetry that played with the boundaries between genre and medium, between music and written words. In the remainder of this extended introduction, I will

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set the stage with various points of historical and artistic context relevant to all four poets, including cases of other poets inspired by opera. I will then conclude by outlining the chapters of this book.

1.2   Opera and Poetry The importance of opera for these poets should always be considered against the backdrop of a growing anxiety about the relevance of poetry in the twentieth century. Futurism was only one expression of this anxiety. The poets who collaborated on the Florentine periodical La Voce, for instance, were similarly determined to reject the artistic forms of the past, conceiving of a fragmentary poetry that emulated the experimentations of contemporary authors elsewhere in Europe. As already mentioned, the Crepuscular Poets rejected traditional models of Italian poetry by turning dramatically inward, writing confessional, nostalgic works. In the 1930s, the “Ermetismo” movement sought new forms of “hermetic” poetry that would divorce them from their predecessors by imitating French Decadentism and Symbolism, creating works rich with analogy and metaphysical subtext. As in the cases of these counter-movements, the four principal poets of this study all wanted to forge a new way for poetry, to keep it relevant in the modern era, but they did so through a thematics of opera. Perhaps at opera’s height (before the decline harkened by Puccini’s death), its very popularity had precluded it from this rejuvenating role: in prior decades, it had been poets of other nationalities who drew on Italian opera to revitalize their own works. Walt Whitman (1819–1892) cited opera as a principal source of inspiration in the 1850s (when he was composing Leaves of Grass [1855])23 and published a number of essays on opera in Brooklyn’s Daily Eagle.24 After having initially criticized the genre, Whitman was converted into a voracious operagoer, attending performances at the Astor Opera Theater and other venues in New York City, where Italian opera singers performed on a regular basis. Whitman held Italian belcanto in high esteem, and this is openly reflected in his poems, some of which use a musical lexicon, others of which are dedicated to opera celebrities of the poet’s time (like “To a Certain Cantatrice” [1860], dedicated to his favorite singer, the belcanto virtuoso Marietta Alboni [1826–1894]).25 In “Proud Music of the Storm” (1869), a poem imbued with musical language and metaphors, Whitman names famous opera characters etched into his mind’s eye: Norma, Lucia di Lammermoor, Ernani.26 At times Whitman reconstructs stylistic elements of opera, like in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”

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(1900), which juxtaposes narrative passages with lyrical ones in imitation of early opera’s alternation between recitativo and arias.27 In the next century, Italian opera had a crucial impact on the intellectual formation of James Joyce (1882–1941). The son of amateur musicians, Joyce was a fervent operagoer from a young age. Several biographers describe the enthusiasm he showed during these performances, a sentimentality that clashed with his otherwise poised personality.28 A singer himself, he spoke of a preference for Rossini, Meyerbeer, and Verdi. And like Whitman, he was a lover of Italian belcanto, as reflected in Chap. 11 (“Sirens”) of Ulysses (1922). Timothy Martin has detailed the layered debt to opera throughout this novel, in particular to Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), an iconic portrayal of the “libertine” archetype (which will reappear periodically among the Italian poets of this study).29 Martin argues that Joyce’s stylistic inclusiveness and virtuosity aims in part at reproducing belcanto itself, which was geared to showcase the technical prowess of its singers. And again like Whitman, Joyce adopts Wagner’s technique of leitmotif (another element that will resurface among our four Italian poets). Several studies have examined the influence of opera (including that of Wagner) on the poetry of T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).30 This influence is part of Eliot’s broader interest in musical forms and music theory: as John Xiros Cooper puts it, “music is present in Eliot’s work from beginning to end . . . as theme, as metaphor, as form.”31 Eliot was famously influenced by Ezra Pound (1885–1972), himself an amateur composer who produced three operas (the most famous being Le Testament de Villon, a 1919 adaptation of the homonymous poem by French medieval poet François Villon [1431–1463]), and who entitled his best-known collection Cantos, as much an homage to vocal music as it was to Dante.32 Finally, Anglo-­ American poet W.  H. Auden (1907–1973) discovered his passion for Italian opera relatively late in life, but its impact was profound. He wrote several opera librettos for prominent composers like Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), most notably the latter’s The Rake’s Progress (1951), a three-act opera that revisits the aforementioned “libertine archetype.”33 Auden (whom I will discuss further in Chap. 6) also wrote influential articles on the nature of opera and on the relationship between this genre and poetry (these articles forming the backbone of his collection of critical essays, The Dyer’s Hand [1962]). This sampling shows the impact of opera on transnational literary traditions, but even more prominent is its influence on the literature of Italy itself. As Giovanna Gronda explains, early operas attracted the talent of academic poets, who wrote librettos for an educated, courtly public.34

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Two librettists in particular—Giovanni Francesco Busenello (1598–1659) and Giacinto Andrea Cicognini (1606–1650)—were instrumental in consolidating the genre’s stylistic conventions and cementing its popularity with contemporary audiences. Other poets contributed to opera’s rise in different ways: Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), for example, reflected on the technical aspects of the genre in his poem Adone (1623) and in his more experimental collection Galeria (1619–1620), developing what Giuseppe Mazzotta has called an “operatic aesthetics.”35 When opera moved from royal palazzos into the first public theaters, the genre became part of a larger mechanism of cultural production, and librettos began to be written by specialized, professional figures. Nonetheless, renowned poets and court professionals continued to play central roles in the genre’s evolution (including Apostolo Zeno [1669–1750], Pietro Metastasio [1698–1782], and renowned playwright Carlo Goldoni [1707–1793]).36 At the same time, professional librettists began to rise to the prominence of celebrities, as in the case of Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838), who enjoyed great popularity as librettist for the Italian Theater in Vienna even after the death of his patron, Emperor Joseph II. Da Ponte (who was most notably a favorite librettist of Mozart’s) continued to garner fame late in life even after he was forced to flee to the United States, introducing opera to New York City by founding the city’s first opera house, the New York Opera Company.37

1.3   Modern Poet-Librettists As opera continued to transform, the twentieth century saw several Italian authors again trying their hands as librettists or collaborating with contemporary composers. Most prominent among them was Gabriele D’Annunzio, a larger-than-life figure heavily influenced by music (as I will detail in Chap. 2). D’Annunzio collaborated with composers like Paolo Tosti (1846–1916), Claude Debussy (1862–1918), and Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945); his most popular collaboration was with Debussy for Le Martyr de Saint Sébastien (1911). D’Annunzio’s contemporary, the Sicilian playwright, novelist, and Nobel Prize-winner Luigi Pirandello, likewise collaborated with several composers, most famously Luigi Malipiero (1901–1975), who (between 1930 and 1932) adapted Pirandello’s novella Il figlio cambiato (The Changed Son, 1902).38 In 1935, Naples saw the first performance of an operatic adaptation of Pirandello’s comedy Liolà (1917) by composer Giuseppe Mulè (1885–1951).

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Later in the twentieth century, Eugenio Montale (the subject of Chaps. 4 and 6) also worked as a librettist, coinciding with his activity as translator.39 His most notable collaboration was with composer Goffredo Petrassi (1904–2003) on the one-act opera Il cordovano, an adapted translation of an entremés (farce) by Miguel de Cervantes. The work was first performed at La Scala in Milan on May 12, 1949, conducted by Nino Sanzogno (1911–1983) and directed by Giorgio Strehler (1921–1997). Evoking the comedic tone of mid-eighteenth-century opera buffa, Il cordovano was not favorably received by critics or the general public. A few years later, Montale translated Omar Del Carlo’s libretto for Proserpina y el Extranjero, a text set to music by the Argentinian composer Juan José Castro. Unlike Il cordovano, this three-act opera was a success, awarded the 1951 Verdi prize and performed in Milan on March 17, 1952, as “Proserpina e lo straniero.” Other minor collaborations included the translation of the libretto of Manuel De Falla’s Atlàntida (1927–1949, premiering at La Scala),40 and Christopher Vernon Hassall’s libretto for William Walton’s Chaucerinspired grand opera Troilus and Cressida (1954) (also opening at La Scala, on January 12, 1956, as “Troilo e Cressida”). Although Italo Calvino (1923–1985) called himself a “reluctant” librettist, he wrote several opera librettos and adapted a number of his own short stories to be set to music.41 Early in his career, he wrote the libretto (based on his own short story “La villeggiatura in panchina,” from Marcovaldo) for the one-act opera La panchina (1956) by Italian composer Sergio Liberovici (1930–1991).42 More famously, Calvino worked on an Italian version of Johann Andreas Schachtner’s libretto for Mozart’s Zaide, an incomplete two-act opera composed between 1779 and 1780. This Italian version premiered at Venice’s Palazzo Grassi in 1982. But Calvino’s most fruitful collaboration was with contemporary composer Luciano Berio (1925–2003). The two worked together on the libretto for La vera storia (1981), partly inspired by Il trovatore. Calvino, a great admirer of the Enlightenment, sought to subvert the Romanticism of Verdi’s original by infusing his reply with the ordered aloofness of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century literature.43 The Berio-Calvino collaboration (which had begun in 1959 with a ballet entitled Allez-hop44) continued years after La vera storia, with Berio also adapting “Un re in ascolto” from Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun.45 Another longtime collaborator of Berio, poet Edoardo Sanguineti (1930–2010), placed opera at the fore of his creative output. Sanguineti was a prolific playwright and librettist, as well as one of the most

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innovative and acclaimed poets of the second half of the twentieth century. A knowledgeable music connoisseur, he frequently advanced his ideas on opera (and performance arts in general), in articles, interviews, and conference papers.46 Several musicians would go on to set his works to music: in an interview Sanguineti stated that he gave total freedom to those who requested to adapt his poetry to music.47 By contrast, as a librettist, Sanguineti’s priority was to create poems that were easily adaptable into a musical score—he saw the librettist as working in the service of the composer.48 Among his collaborations with composers, the most important was with Berio, who shared his opinions on music.49 Their first and most celebrated work was the opera Passaggio (1962), an allegorical portrayal of a woman’s journey through six “Stations of the Cross.” This collaboration represents, however, an exception to Sanguineti’s policy on the librettist’s subordination to the composer—in the creation of Passaggio, Sanguineti and Berio worked as equals, without specified roles.50 Aside from this productive partnership, Sanguineti also worked with musicians like Andrea Liberovici and Ennio Morricone.51

1.4   Pascoli Other Italian authors were not as successful as librettists, but their love for opera nonetheless had a profound impact on their writing. Most prominent among them was poet Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), a true melomaniac52—a music fanatic—who considered opera to have succeeded in its original goal (from the Camerata de’ Bardi) of uniting music and words into an ideal art form.53 Even though he lacked a formal musical education, Pascoli frequently tried his hand at writing librettos which he would not complete, but parts of which would end up in other works. His dream was to write librettos that would revolutionize opera by elevating its literary quality, freeing productions from the stylistic constraints of modern trends, in particular the sentimentalism and almost exclusive focus on rural themes that characterized Italian verismo.54 Critic Annarita Zazzaroni pinpoints the factors that inspired Pascoli’s desire to become a librettist: the artistic and social prominence of opera, the genre’s capacity to reach a wider audience than would poetry alone, and the unique emotional power of music to reach into the human soul. Pascoli’s ultimate goal was to contribute to the creation of a new Italian national melodrama, a modernized Greek tragedy, comparable to Wagner’s operas—an ambition (as I will show in Chap. 2) shared by D’Annunzio.55

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Pascoli found an early supporter and kindred spirit in the young composer Riccardo Zandonai (1888–1944), who set the ode “Il ritorno di Odisseo” (later called “Il ritorno” in Odi e Inni) to music in 1901. Zandonai also scored two poems from Pascoli’s Myricae (1903): “Lontana” and “Assiuolo.”56 The two also partnered on an ambitious endeavor, the opera La fine di Mefistofele (a title later changed to Gretchen’s Tochter), a work they conceived as a continuation of the events portrayed in Part One of Goethe’s magnum opus Faust.57 In the meantime, Pascoli sought the collaboration of several other composers, including Leoncavallo, Mascagni, and Puccini. His poems “Il sogno di Rosetta” and “L’antica madre” (Odi e Inni) were set to music, respectively, by composers Carlo Alfredo Mussinelli and Giovanni Zagari. Both works premiered in 1901: they are the only compositions based on Pascoli’s words ever to be performed in public. Pascoli’s archives, in fact, contain a trove of incomplete dramas, tragedies, and plays.58 Among them the most ambitious project was the libretto for an opera tentatively entitled Nell’anno Mille, in collaboration with composer Renzo Bossi (1883–1965), with whom Pascoli sought to replace Wagner’s northern mythology with an Italian one, based on fantastical and often Dantean motifs.59 Ultimately, Pascoli became convinced that this work would be the national melodrama he envisioned, finally reviving the greatness of Greek tragedy.60 Pascoli’s desire to write for opera was driven by a profound dissatisfaction with the expressive means of poetry. For him, the common root shared by music and poetry was rhythm, and thus he came to feel that increasing his poetry’s musical rhythmicality was a way to surpass the limitations he (and others) were beginning to perceive in the poetic form.61 We can see him putting this idea into action with the rigorous rhythmic texture of some of his poems and their abundant use of parisyllabic meters, as well as rhymes, assonances, and onomatopoeias that imitate musical elements.62 This aspect of Pascoli’s poetry became even more prominent in Canti di Castelvecchio (1903). Here Pascoli abandoned the fragmentary prosody of Myricae and looked for more regular metrical forms, relying heavily on repetitions, onomatopoeia, and meters such as the novenario.63 Ironically, it was precisely this focus on the rhythmic and acoustic dimension of poetry that made Pascoli’s poems so challenging to set to music, an issue that also affected and undermined the adaptation of D’Annunzio’s poems and plays.64 Even unpublished, Pascoli’s incomplete dramas and librettos would influence his own later poetry. The Canzoni di Re Enzio (1908), a

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collection of epic poems about medieval Italy, reprises themes and passages from Nell’anno Mille (as Zazzaroni explains).65 Other poems were dedicated to towering musical figures, in particular Verdi and Rossini, whom Pascoli held to be symbols of the Italian genius. The ode “A Verdi” (Odi e inni) commemorates the anniversary of the composer’s death,66 while the poem “A Rossini” (Poemi italici, 1911) applauds the greatness of an artist with whom Pascoli felt profound intellectual affinities (and with whom he shared roots in central Italy).67 The poem “A Giuseppe Giacosa” (Odi e inni)68 honors one of Puccini’s longtime librettists and collaborators, who became one of Pascoli’s own epistolary interlocutors.69

1.5   Gozzano The influence of opera on Guido Gozzano (1883–1916) was first highlighted by Montale, who pointed out the many parallels between the poet’s works and those of Puccini.70 Montale cites their shared preference for humble subjects and characters, underscoring the bourgeois context in which their works were conceived and their similar goals of honestly depicting human feelings and passions. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) expanded on Montale’s points by analyzing the use of a “double stylistic register” (the alternation between narrative passages and lyrical “explosions”) in Gozzano’s poems.71 Silvia Morotti, in turn, built on both Montale’s and Pasolini’s insights, offering a model to interpret the stylistic and thematic influence of opera on Gozzano’s works.72 According to Morotti, Gozzano’s detached representation of the erotic ought to be understood as a mockery of the sentimentalism of nineteenth-century opera librettos. To better comprehend this, one must consider the plurality of voices and characters in Gozzano’s poems. In collections like La via del rifugio (1907) and I colloqui (1911), for instance, Gozzano employs both male and female characters as alter egos for himself. The male voices use a narrative style and speak in the first person, often in an ironic tone, while the female voices are more lyrical, using shorter and more regular verses: Morotti sees the contrast between these two registers as an imitation of opera’s familiar alternation between recitativo and aria (similar to Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”).73 Lonardi concurs that there are formal intersections between Gozzano’s poetry and opera librettos, but he argues that the poet’s opera thematics is mostly ironic and detached.74 Gozzano often includes joking references to particular operas, bordering on open mockery. For instance, in the

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poem “Paolo e Virginia” (I colloqui), the line “Morii d’amore” clearly parodies the incipit of Tosca’s aria: “Vissi d’arte. Vissi d’amore” (Tosca, II, 5). But textual citations of librettos are not as prominent in Gozzano’s poetry as in that of other authors: the poet’s indebtedness toward opera is revealed, for the most part, by his metrical and stylistic choices. Gozzano crafts his most lyrical passages, for example, by using short, regular meters (settenario, quinario, ottonario, and senario), and a fixed accentuation that evokes the structure of nineteenth-century arias. We can see this in the poem “Nemesi” (La via del rifugio), where Morotti points to Gozzano’s tendency to delay the emotional crescendo of his quatrains until the last two lines, in imitation of a strategy found frequently in the arias of Verdi.75 Finally, Gozzano evokes the lexicon of opera librettos, using an outdated vocabulary and an overtly literary syntax (frequently placing, for instance, adjective before noun), and making abundant use of superlatives, hyperboles, and mots d’esprit. These elements point to a strong yet elusive stylistic debt to opera in Gozzano’s poetry, one that goes beyond textual references and citations alone. Other protagonists of twentieth-century Italian poetry demonstrate different forms of engagement with the genre. In Giuseppe Ungaretti’s earlier collections one finds sporadic but unmistakable quotations from opera librettos. Lonardi cites the poem “Veglia” as an example of this76: Nel mio silenzio ho scritto lettere piene d’amore Non sono mai stato tanto attaccato alla vita (“Veglia,” 11–16)

This poem, from the collection Il porto sepolto (1923), depicts the trench warfare of World War I, in which Ungaretti served as infantryman. The poem contrasts the death of a fellow soldier and the profound desire for living that suddenly grips the narrator. But its closing lines recall a key moment of Puccini’s masterpiece Tosca. In the final moments of the third act, the painter Cavaradossi, sentenced to death, is locked in the Vatican prison of Castel Sant’Angelo, awaiting his execution. Cavaradossi, haunted by a sense of impending doom, tries to recall happy moments with his lover Tosca:

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Svanì per sempre il sogno mio d’amore... L’ora è fuggita... e muoio disperato! E muoio disperato! E non ho amato mai tanto la vita, tanto la vita! (Tosca, III.2)77

The presence of this famous aria (“E lucevan le stelle”) in Ungaretti’s “Veglia” is not limited to its final lines (echoed in Ungaretti’s “Non sono mai stato / tanto attaccato / alla vita”). More broadly, the popular familiarity of this aria gave it a shared cultural significance: Cavaradossi’s pathos was a recognizable symbol of the ticking clock of mortality, the individual awaiting the inevitable fate we all share. In Ungaretti’s poem, this pathos is projected onto the lone soldier in the trench—later in this book, we will see Cavaradossi return to this role (a symbol of awaiting one’s fate) in the works of other poets. Pascoli, Gozzano, and Ungaretti offer different models for the influence of opera on modern Italian poetry. But their work references opera only occasionally in comparison to the poets I will focus on in this book’s chapters. Before summarizing these chapters, let me situate my argument in relation to the secondary literature pertaining to our topic.

1.6   Critical Assessments The vast majority of research on music in Italian literature comes, not surprisingly, from Italy itself – a gap in Anglophone scholarship that this book is intended to reduce. Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol’s Musica e letteratura in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento (2000) is a crowning achievement of this Italian work.78 A recently renewed academic interest in opera librettos has led to some libretto studies by literary scholars: an anthology by Giovanna Gronda and Paolo Fabbri; Ulrich Weisstein’s work on librettos as literary texts; a volume of essays edited by Walter Bernhart; the work of Mario Lavagetto and Luigi Baldacci; and studies by Friedrich Lippmann and (more recently) Paolo Fabbri.79 These contributions, like Corazzol’s, are broad in scope, but the majority of focused studies are on D’Annunzio and music, for example the work of Cellucci Marcone (1972), Tedeschi (1988), and Ferrari (2015). Montale and Saba’s musical thematics have attracted far less attention,80 and for the most part this attention has been devoted only to locating operatic references in the poets’ works,81 neglecting to investigate the broader role of opera in their artistic and intellectual

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development. Such a comprehensive investigation is needed for these authors in particular, who looked (albeit in different ways) to music and to the musicality of the written word as a means of confronting a growing crisis they perceived in poetry, a shared doubt about poetry’s relevance in the modern era. My goal in this book is thus not simply to identify operatic allusions in these authors, but to look at this larger issue—the use of music to confront this poetic crisis—by engaging with the field of “melopoetics”—the study of the relationships between literature and music. Melopoetics was pioneered by Calvin S.  Brown in his seminal Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (1948).82 Brown’s goal was to highlight the formal elements shared by music and literature, and in so doing to lay the theoretical foundation for subsequent analyses. Indeed, his work inspired other scholars—like Steven Paul Scher and Werner Wolf83—and led to the creation of the International Association of Word and Music Studies (WMA), whose mission is to promote interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry into the interconnections between literature and music. As Roberto Russi has explained, the discipline of melopoetics came into existence from the necessity to bring order to the sprawling, non-­ specialized, and often confusing literature on the interactions of words and music.84 A cornerstone of melopoetics, that is, is an ongoing focus on finding the best methodology to approach this complex subject.85 After Brown, Paul Scher proposed a three-pronged model of melopoetic analysis, identifying three different “movements” between the arts: “music to literature,” “literature into music,” and “music and literature.” This approach was expanded by the organizers of the Words and Music Forum, who continue to publish methodological and theoretical studies, and to document the ever-expanding bibliography of melopoetics.86 Among the scholars who have offered strong models for the further evolution of this field, Werner Wolf has advanced what he calls an “intermedial approach,” challenging the original labelling of melopoetics as an “interart” discipline.87 Wolf looks closely at recent developments in musicology, and above all seeks to strengthen the dialogue between melopoetics and cultural studies. In the chapters that follow I will pursue a similar approach, though instead of cultural studies I will ground my melopoetic analyses in literary scholarship, looking to librettos as literary models for poets, and from there making forays into the broader cultural significance of opera for twentieth-century Italians. In this regard, my work deals with Scher’s second stage, the “movement of music into literature.”

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1.7   Chapter Summaries Chapter 2, “From Bayreuth to Fiume: D’Annunzio, Wagner, and the Death of Italian Opera,” probes Gabriele D’Annunzio’s conflicted relationship with opera and his ambition to return to the genre’s intellectual and artistic origins in Italy. D’Annunzio’s relationship with music has been the subject of ample critical inquiry, most notably in the work of Guarnieri Corazzol and Rubens Tedeschi. Unlike previous scholars, however, I will argue that D’Annunzio’s engagement with opera was built on a restless dissatisfaction with the genre. D’Annunzio was harshly critical of contemporary opera, and saw value in the genre only insofar as it represented a potential unification of literature, music, and theater. He gave great weight to opera’s origins in the Camerata de’ Bardi, but found that Italian operas did not live up to the Camerata’s ideal. He did, however, find in the operas of Richard Wagner (which D’Annunzio understood through a Nietzschean lens) the realization of “total works of art” in that they reconnected the genre with ancient Greek tragedy. D’Annunzio sought to recreate Wagner’s achievements in Italy, imagining a return to the art of Monteverdi’s era, advocating for this return with his novel Il fuoco (The Flame, 1900), and also with his unrealized plans to build an Italian performance space that would be a Mediterranean equivalent of Wagner’s Festival House in Bayreuth. Chapter 3, “Umberto Saba and the Verdian Sound of Italy,” centers on Saba’s desire to emulate the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), to many the symbol of Italian opera in general. Saba saw Verdi as a mythical figure and a model of intellectual integrity. In this chapter I argue that Verdi shaped in particular Saba’s views on nationalism and cultural belonging. Saba was born in Trieste at the end of the nineteenth century, when the city was still a peripheral territory of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire. Throughout his career, he wrote in Italian and was preoccupied with the goal of finding his place in the Italian literary tradition: writing poetry, for Saba, was in large part an act of laying claim to a cultural background. From this perspective, Verdi was an artist who, to Saba, represented Italy itself: an uncompromised symbol of national identity, an identity that was conveyed through the language of opera. Operatic images, allusions, and open quotations from Verdi’s librettos punctuate Saba’s poems, and allow us to trace the contours of Saba’s passion not simply for Verdi, but for a deeper concept of “Italianness.”

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Chapter 4, “More Than Words: Ossi di seppia, Opera, and the Miracle of Counter-Eloquence,” examines the influence of opera on Montale’s early poetry, with particular focus on Ossi di seppia (1925) and the so-­ called pre-history of Montale’s mature oeuvre, the poems that preceded and anticipated his first book’s themes and intellectual concerns. The operatic voices that echo throughout Montale’s body of work have been, until recently, the object of a discontinuous, inadequate, and inconclusive critical inquiry. Gilberto Lonardi’s Il fiore dell’addio (2003), however, offers a more comprehensive reading of Montale’s textual and thematic relationship with opera. Building on Lonardi’s argument, I contend in this chapter that references to opera in Ossi di seppia are an integral part of Montale’s philosophically minded quest for a new poetic language. Montale would later state that, as he wrote his first book, he was obeying “a need for musical expression.” He would claim to be the most “musical” poet of his generation, comparing himself to Pascoli and D’Annunzio. Such claims were not all they appeared to be: Montale’s musical ambition came to be the language of his antagonism toward his poetic predecessors. His poetic vision was to penetrate more fully into the essence of the phenomenal world than these predecessors had, and music—in particular opera—became his means to accomplish this. Chapter 5, “Heart of Darkness: Saba’s Operatic Eroticism,” looks at the eroticism in Saba’s poetry in relation to his interest in opera and other musical forms. My main focus is the second book of the Canzoniere, which comprises poems written between 1922 and 1931—the most recognizable and celebrated phase of Saba’s poetry. This book is dense with quotations from opera librettos, as well as images, motifs, and dramatic situations borrowed from the operatic repertoire. For Saba, the power of these operatic references lay in their ability to convey the conflicting elements of his soul—most notably, the question of his sexuality. They conveyed this inner conflict by allowing him to stage mini-dramas within his works and to find familiar popular refrains for his own recurring themes (most notably the “mending” of his broken heart, a metonym of his neuroses and conflicted identity). Chapter 6, “Strange Mercy: Montale, Opera, and the Death of Tragedy,” analyzes the centrality of what Roberto Orlando has called the “theme of imprisonment” in Montale’s poetry. I focus in particular on La bufera e altro, where Montale frequently represents a poetic self that is trapped in an enclosure while catastrophe rages outside. Lonardi has shown that Montale borrows this theme from famous moments of

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“imprisonment” in opera, especially from Verdi’s Il trovatore and Puccini’s Tosca. But whereas Lonardi argues that this imprisonment represents the individual’s sense of being “trapped” in the machinery of history (the horrors of the Second World War), I contend that there is another crucial layer to Montale’s imprisonment theme: the poet has become dissatisfied with the poetic form itself and feels trapped within its limits. It is precisely this dissatisfaction that will lead Montale to privilege opera: his eventual means of liberation from the “prison” of poetry will be to fill his poems with the language of opera, which will allow him to envision a new form of tragedy, one that has its roots in ancient Greek theater but that (thanks to opera) has a modern voice and can be applied to the atrocities of the twentieth century. Chapter 7, “Poetry and the Beast: Giorgio Caproni’s Simulations of Opera,” focuses on a poet whose relationship with music was far more direct than that of his predecessors. A trained violinist and aspiring composer, Caproni, eventually abandoned musical studies and replaced the violin with poetry. But he would still make music the centerpiece of both his fiction and his theoretical writings. In his later, most ambitious collections—such as Muro della terra (1975), Il franco cacciatore (1982), and Il conte di Kevenhüller (1986)—Caproni sought to imitate opera through the written word. My analysis of Caproni will reveal elements of continuity with Saba and Montale, in particular in the ambition to address a gnawing restlessness toward the limitations of poetic expression.

Notes 1. William Weaver, The Golden Century of Italian Opera from Rossini to Puccini (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 242. 2. In his commentary on Dante, Mandelstam describes the Russian bias toward the Italian language: “For the genteel mob of that age the Italian language, heard only from the seats at the opera, sounded like some poetic chirping. Both then and now, no one in Russia studied Italian poetry seriously, considering it merely a property of the voice or an adjunct to music.” Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, “Addenda to ‘Conversation about Dante,’” in The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1979), 444. 3. A number of studies have discussed the Florentine Camerata and the development of Italian opera over the centuries. Among the most relevant are Nino Pirrotta, “Temperaments and Tendencies in the Florentine Camerata,” The Musical Quarterly 40 (1954), 169–189; Claude V. Palisca,

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“The Camerata Fiorentina: A Reappraisal,” Studi musicali 1 (1972): 203–36; Claude V. Palisca, The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Warren Kirkendale, “La favola della ‘nascita dell’opera’ nella camerata fiorentina demitizzata da Emilio De’ Cavalieri,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 37, no. 1 (2002): 131–141. 4. Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). On the origins of commercial opera in seventeenth-century Venice, see also Beth and Jonathan Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See likewise Simon Towneley Worsthorne’s seminal Venetian Opera in the seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). 5. Nicastro says of his book Il melodramma e gli italiani: “nasce come una sorta di campionario di ipotesi sulle ragioni e sul momento storico di coincidenza tra melodramma e gens o, meglio, nazione; e dunque null’altro pretende che a vedere l’evento ‘opera’ nella sua qualità di fatto di comunicazione e aggregazione, oltre che ad agitare qualche troppo stagnante acqua attorno alle cause stilistiche di quel legame” ([this book] is born as a sort of sampling of hypotheses on the reasons and on the historical moment of coincidence between melodrama and gens or, better, nation; and therefore it does not have any other ambition than to see “opera” in its quality of both means of communication and social aggregator, as well as to stir up some stagnant water around the stylistic causes of that bond). Aldo Nicastro, Il melodramma e gli italiani (Milano: Rusconi, 1982), 15. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 6. Bruno Barilli, Il paese del melodramma (Lanciano: Carabba, 1929). 7. William Ashbrook and Harold Powers, Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 8. Barilli writes about Verdi: “Ci sembra che tutta una miracolosa razza teatrale si sia spenta con lui sul finire del secolo scorso. Nelle generazioni successive, rimescolate e confuse frettolosamente dalla politica, dalla guerra e dalla cosiddetta cultura economica, non ritroviamo più traccia di quel che fu l’affanno lirico, l’idolatria romanzesca e musicale degli italiani dell’ottocento; si direbbe che i legami di sangue, le affinità di temperamento e di sentimento che dovrebbero unirci al passato siano scaduti e dimenticati per sempre” (It seems to me that a whole miraculous theatrical race died out with Puccini at the end of the last century. In the following generations, mixed and hastily confused by politics, war and the so-called economic culture, one can no longer find traces of what was the lyrical struggle, the romantic and musical idolatry of nineteenth-century Italians;

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we might say that the bonds of blood, the affinities of temperament and the mutual feelings that should unite us with the past, have expired and been forgotten forever). Barilli, 20. 9. David Kimbell, Italian Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 10. Massimo Mila does not even agree with the thesis of the “decline” and understands Puccini as a transitional figure, one who connected the past of the so-called Great Tradition of opera with the experimentations of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Massimo Mila, Breve storia della musica (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), 433. 11. Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, “Puccini e la morte dell’opera,” Musica e letteratura in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento (Florence: Sansoni, 2000), 383–90. 12. “Noi vogliamo distruggere i musei, le biblioteche, le accademie d’ogni specie, e combattere contro il moralismo, il femminismo e contro ogni viltà opportunistica e utilitaria” (We want to destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, fight moralism, feminism, and every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice). “Manifesto del Futurismo,” Le Figaro, February 20, 1909. 13. Ashbrook and Powers, Puccini’s Turandot, 164. 14. In their music manifestos, the Futurists challenged conventional harmony, rethinking the grammar of music as well as its social role. They pushed for the abolition of the traditional tonal scale and insisted on a radical shift toward cacophony. In the long term, their goal was to abolish the distinction between dissonance and consonance in poetic language. See Beatrice Sica, “Molto rumore per nulla,” Lettere italiane 61, no. 3 (2009): 382–399. 15. Pratella did make some concessions, acknowledging a “futurist” desire for innovation in the early efforts of the Camerata de’ Bardi and praising some of Pietro Mascagni’s attempts to renew the stale forms of opera verista (Pratella had in fact been an apprentice to Mascagni). For an English translation of this and other Futurist manifestos, see Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking Press, 1973). For a commentary on Pratella’s manifestos see also Claudio A. D’Antoni, “Il futurismo musicale secondo Francesco Balilla Pratella,” Otto/Novecento 1 (2007): 27–40. 16. “Am I perhaps a poet? / Certainly not. / It writes only one word, and an odd one, / the pen of my soul: / ‘folly.’” Translation by Michael Palma, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Brock (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012), 131. 17. The formula “poeti crepuscolari” (“Twilight Poets”) was coined by the Italian critic and novelist Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (1882–1952) to describe a group of poets who, dissatisfied with the generation of poets

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that came before them, became disenchanted with poetic expression in general. Among the most prominent authors in this group are Marino Moretti (1885–1979), Corrado Govoni (1884–1965), Sergio Corazzini (1886–1907), and Guido Gozzano. Even the early work of Palazzeschi is often associated with the Crepuscular Poets, in particular his first book, I cavalli bianchi (1907). 18. On this subject see Beatrice Sica, “Il futurismo e il tempo,” Il tempo e la poesia: Un quadro novecentesco, ed. Elisabetta Graziosi (Bologna: Clueb, 2008), 57–85. 19. Ashbrook and Powers write: “Puccini’s heirs, then, were D.  L. Griffiths and Cecil B.  De Mille—or in our day, Dino De Laurentiis and Franco Zeffirelli. Perhaps the emergence of Zeffirelli—like Forzano, director of films and director of operas, but also directors of opera as films—may even be taken as symptomatic of a final convergence of these two modes of survival for the Great Tradition of Italian opera,” Puccini’s Turandot, 5. 20. Guarnieri Corazzol, Musica e letteratura in Italia, 389. 21. Ever since the era of silent films, cinema has absorbed elements from opera. The interconnections between the two media has been given steady academic attention, and the field continues to expand, now looking also at televised performances, operas created specifically for the screen, and cinematic or televisual allusions and references to opera. A pioneering work in this field is Jeremy Tambling’s Opera, Ideology, and Film (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987). See also Marcia Citron, “Opera and Film” in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 44–71. 22. In doing so, I will be taking up an idea first suggested by Gilberto Lonardi, Fiore dell’addio: Leonora, Manrico e altri fantasmi del melodramma nella poesia di Montale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 11. 23. A seminal study on Whitman and opera is Robert D. Faner’s Walt Whitman and Opera (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1951). 24. Among Whitman’s essays on opera see “Letters from Paumanok  – Brooklyn, August 11,” New York Evening Post, August 14, 1851, in which he reviews a performance of Donizetti’s La favorita in Castle Garden, and “The Opera,” Life Illustrated, November 1955, where he describes the pleasures of opera-going, a theme he reprised in a later essay, entitled “The Old Bowery.” 25. See Joann P.  Krieg, “Whitman’s Bel Canto Spider,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, no. 4 (1987): 28–30. 26. “Across the stage with pallor on her face, yet lurid passion, / Stalks Norma brandishing the dagger in her hand. // I see poor crazed Lucia’s eyes’ unnatural gleam, / Her hair down her back falls loose and disheveled. // I see where Ernani walking the bridal garden, / Amid the scent of night-­

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roses, radiant, holding his bride by the hand, / Hears the infernal call, the death-pledge of the horn.” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: First Vintage Books, 1982), 527. 27. The poet openly places the two in opposition, distinguishing them by different meters and even typography, printing his “arias” in italics. The distinction between recitative—spoken word passages that have primarily the function of moving the dramatic action—and arias—sung passages—is a key formal characteristic of early operas. It was first codified by philologist and music theorist Giovanni Battista Doni (1593–1647) in Trattato della musica scenica (Treatise on Music for the Theater, 1640). The hierarchy between the two elements was a central point of contention in early reflections on opera. The difference between these two formal elements became looser after Gluck’s reform in the second half of the 1700s. See Coletti, 42–52. 28. See Timothy Martin, “Operatic Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 38, no. 1/2 (Fall 2000-Winter 2001): 25. 29. See Martin, “Operatic Joyce,” 25–43. 30. See especially John Xiros Cooper, T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000). For an examination of melodramatic elements in Eliot’s poetry see also John A. M. Rillie, “Melodramatic Device in T. S. Eliot,” The Review of English Studies 13, no. 51 (August 1962): 267–81. 31. Cooper, xv. 32. Pound also composed an opera entitled Cavalcanti (1932), about the Italian medieval poet Guido Cavalcanti. For the relationship between Pound and music, see R.  Murray Schafer, Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism (New York: New Directions, 1977). Pound’s work was later broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on October 26–27, 1931, as an experimental “radio opera.” For a study of Pound’s radio operas see Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2002). 33. The Rake’s Progress was first performed in Italy, at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, on September 11, 1951. 34. Giovanna Gronda. “Il libretto d’opera fra letteratura e teatro,” in Libretti d’opera italiani, ed. Giovanna Gronda and Paolo Fabbri (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), 16. On the rise of opera and academic patronage, see also Tim Carter, Music, Patronage and Printing in Late Renaissance Florence (Aldershot, Hampshire, Great Britain and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000). 35. In “Giambattista Marino’s Operatic Aesthetics,” Giuseppe Mazzotta examines the impact of operatic aesthetics on Dicerie sacre (1614) and Adone (1623). Mazzotta reflects on death as the pivotal theme in Marino’s under-

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standing of opera. Word, Image and Song 1 (2013): 251–264. See also Victor Coelho’s article on Marino: “Marino’s Toccata between the Lutenist and the Nightingale,” in The Sense of Marino: Literature, Fine Arts and Music of the Italian Baroque, ed. Francesco Guardiani (New York & Toronto: Legas, 1994), 395–427. 36. Goldoni, also a librettist of opera seria, had a role in the development of opera buffa. Opera seria, literally “serious opera,” conventionally refers to Italian tragic operas of eighteenth and nineteenth century. But its origins can be traced back to the Arcadian Academy in Rome and its effort to write librettos in accordance with the principles of tragedy established by Aristotle’s Poetics. Comic operas have been written since the late 1600s, though opera buffa usually refers to the highly popular works of the mid-­ 1700s that sought to include theatrical elements of Commedia dell’arte. 37. Two other giants of Italian literature, Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) and Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), are clearly influenced by opera. On Leopardi, see Luca Carlo Rossi, “Leopardi e il melodramma: un incontro mancato,” Ecfrasi musicali: Parole e suono nel Romanticismo italiano (Bergamo: Sestante, 2013), 141–162. On Manzoni, see Alice Di Stefano, Manzoni e il melodramma (Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2005). 38. Pirandello experimented with a number of other media including cinema, television, and even Broadway-style musicals, paying careful attention to the musical accompaniment to his dramas. 39. The opera librettos known to have been translated by Montale are Goffredo Petrassi’s Il Cordovano: opera in un atto (1949), adapted by Montale from a work by Miguel de Cervantes; William Walton’s Troilus and Cressida: Opera in Three Acts (1954), translated into Italian by Montale from the libretto by Christopher Hassall; Juan José Castro’s Proserpina e lo straniero (1951), translated into Italian by Montale from the original libretto by Omar del Carlo; and Manuel De Falla’s Atlàntida (1927–1949), first performed at the Teatro alla Scala, adapted in Italian by Montale. 40. Jacob Blakesley, Modern Italian Poets. Translators of the Impossible (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 75. 41. See the interview “Non sono un librettista” (“I am not a librettist”) with Lorenzo Arruga in Musica viva, 6, no.2 (1982): 56–61. Also in Italo Calvino, Sono nato in America … Interviste 1951–1985 (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), 500–506. 42. Calvino and Liberovici also collaborated on the ballet Lo spaventapasseri (1958). 43. Calvino, Sono nato in America, 498. See also 503–504. 44. Calvino recounts his first collaboration with Berio in an interview with La Revue Musicale (June 1985), later collected in Sono nato in America as “La

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vera storia,” 496–97. See also David Belinfante, “Luciano Berio’s Un re in ascolto,” The Musical Times 130, no. 1752 (1989): 170–71. Berio himself recounted his collaboration with Calvino in “La musicalità di Italo Calvino,” Il Verri no. 5–6 (1988): 9–12. 45. The English composer Jonathan Dove adapted Calvino’s story “L’altra Euridice” into a one-act opera. 46. Some of Sanguineti’s most notable interviews on music and opera are collected in the volume Edoardo Sanguineti: Conversazioni musicali, ed. Roberto Iovino (Rome: Il melangolo, 2011). 47. “A volte vengono messi in musica miei testi senza neppure dirmelo . . . mi sembra una bella iniziativa. Come sarà fatta? Non lo so e non credo che questo debba riguardare in qualche modo noi autori” (Sometimes my lyrics are set to music without notice. . . I like the idea. How will it be done? I do not know and I do not think that this should matter to us authors in any way). Sanguineti, Conversazioni musicali, 50–51. 48. “La mia idea è che io debba dare dei materiali al compositore e questi materiali entrano nella sua creazione, divenendone parte integrante e nello stesso tempo perdendo la loro autonomia a favore di un discorso generale più ampio e più completo. Non ha più rilevanza il verso in sé, ma quello che del verso il musicista utilizza e vuol far arrivare all’ascoltatore” (My conviction is that I have to give materials to the composer and these materials enter his or her creation, becoming an integral part of it and at the same time losing their autonomy in favor of a broader and more complete idea. The verse itself is no longer relevant, but the idea that the musician uses and wants to convey to the listener). Iovino, 49. 49. For a study of the Sanguineti-Berio collaboration, see Claudia Di Luzio, “Sanguineti e Berio: Suono  – voce  – gesto,” Poetiche 8, no. 3 (2006): 529–548. 50. This unconventional approach is part of the experimental nature of the Sanguineti-Berio collaboration. Sanguineti explains the rationale behind this unique method in Conversazioni musicali, 73. 51. Sanguineti’s principal works for music are collected in the volume Per musica (Milan: Ricordi, 1993). 52. The Italian critic Alessandro Zattarin has explored Pascoli’s passion for opera and the influence of the genre on his poetry in “Anch’io voglio scrivere per musica”: Pascoli e il melodramma (Lanciano: Carabba, 2014). Another important contribution, one that focuses primarily on Pascoli’s effort as librettist and its impact on his poetry, is Annarita Zazzaroni, Melodramma senza musica: Giovanni Pascoli, gli abbozzi teatrali e le Canzoni di Re Enzio (Bologna: Patron Editore, 2013). 53. In a letter to the young poet Guglielmo Felice Damiani (1875–1904), dated September 15, 1897, Pascoli explained: “Oh, io credevo di non

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poter scrivere ‘musicalmente’ e ne soffrivo tanto, perché, per me, il vero grande genere poetico sarebbe il ‘dramma musicale’, la tragedia insomma greca modernizzata, il ‘libretto’, come dicono. Che fare della parola sola? Quella è lo schema, nudo e freddo. Ci vuole la musica, la musica” (I thought I could not write “musically” and it was painful because, for me, the really great poetic genre would be the “musical drama,” the modernized Greek tragedy or, in short, as they call it, the “libretto.” What to do with words alone? That’s just a naked and cold skeleton. One needs the music, the music). Salvatore Pintacuda, Renzo Bossi (Milano: Gastaldi, 1955), 110–111. Also in Zattarin, 124. 54. Zazzaroni, Melodramma senza musica, 28. 55. Zazzaroni, Melodramma senza musica, 21. 56. Annarita Zazzaroni, “L’incontro con Giovanni Pascoli, librettista e poeta,” in Alba d’Aprile: Aspetti della produzione giovanile di Riccardo Zandonai, ed. Diego Cescotti and Irene Comisso (Rovereto: Osiride, 2014), 127. 57. Zazzaroni, “L’incontro,” 129. See also Alessandro Debenedetti, “Un libretto di G.  Pascoli sul ‘Mefistofele’: Due lettere inedite a Zandonai,” Giornale d’Italia, November 7, 1924. 58. Some of these plays are collected in Giovanni Pascoli, Testi teatrali inediti, ed. Antonio De Lorenzi (Ravenna: Longo, 1979). 59. Among the most attentive scholars on Pascoli’s relationship with opera, Zazzaroni retraces the backstory of this play by analyzing the epistolary exchanges between the poet and the composer in “Nell’anno Mille attraverso il carteggio Giovanni Pascoli-Renzo Bossi,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 75 (2007): 137–157. See also Nell’Anno Mille: Sue notizie e schemi di altri drammi, ed. Maria Pascoli (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1924); Nell’Anno Mille, ed. Nadia Ebani (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 2002). 60. Zazzaroni, Melodramma senza musica, 43. 61. In the preface to Poemi conviviali, Pascoli writes: “Io non credo troppo nell’efficacia della poesia, e poco spero in quella della mia” (I don’t believe much in the effectiveness of poetry, especially my poetry). Poemi conviviali, (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1905), X. 62. See Zazzaroni’s analysis of the poem “Il ritorno” in Zazzaroni, “L’incontro,” 121–122. 63. Andrea Carrozzini, Da Myricae a Odi e inni: Percorsi testuali e tematici della poesia pascoliana (Galatina: Congedo editore, 2009), 49. 64. See also Paola Montefoschi, “Metrica e musica pascoliana: L’impossibile trasposizione,” Il Verri 3–4 (1995): 75–92. For the acoustic and musical elements in Pascoli’s poetry, see the study by Alessandro Cazzato, La musica delle parole: Giovanni Pascoli (Bari: Florestano, 2011). 65. Zazzaroni, Melodramma senza musica, 103–27.

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66. Giovanni Pascoli, “A Verdi (per il dì trigesimo dal suo transito),” Poesie I (Milano: Mondadori, 1939), 856–861. 67. Giovanni Pascoli, “Rossini,” Poesie II (Milano: Mondadori, 1939), 1099–1113. On Pascoli’s affinity with Rossini, see Zattarin, 52–53. 68. Pascoli, “A Giuseppe Giacosa,” Poesie I, 755–56. 69. These poems contain occasional textual citations from opera librettos and incorporate characters from Pascoli’s favorite operas. As Zattarin suggests, the poet’s biggest impact on Italian opera likely lies in his influence on contemporary composers and professional librettists, the extent of which has not yet been fully explored by scholars. Zattarin elaborates on this idea in the third and final section of his book, entitled “L’opera e Pascoli,” which includes an assessment of Pascoli’s influence on contemporary librettists and composers like Giacosa and Puccini. Zattarin, 309–387. 70. Eugenio Montale, “Due artisti di ieri,” Corriere della sera, October 29, 1949. Also in Eugenio Montale, Il secondo mestiere: Vol. 1. Prose (1920–1979) (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), 850–854. 71. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Guido Gozzano, Poesie,” Tempo, August 5, 1973. Also in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Descrizioni di descrizioni (Milan: Garzanti, 1990), 186–191. 72. Silvia Morotti. “Il ‘Teatrino della passione nascosta’: Gozzano e il melodramma,” Studi italiani 20, no. 1 (2007): 105–122. See also by Morotti, “‘Il cuore non fiorisce’: Le maschere dell’io e la voce del melodramma nella poesia di Guido Gozzano,” Italianistica 1, no 37 (2008): 93–99. A few notes on Gozzano’s references to Verdi can be found in Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, Tristano, mio Tristano: Gli scrittori italiani e il caso Wagner (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988), 114–15. 73. See note 27. 74. Lonardi describes the echo of opera in Gozzano’s poetry as ironic and “stravolta,” meaning twisted, deformed, and also detached, Il fiore dell’addio, 45. 75. Luigi Baldacci has analyzed the metrical structure of librettos for Verdi’s operas, identifying metrical trends of his arias. Verdi used parisyllabic verses for their regularity and musicality. In the first two verses of these quatrains, the stress is descending (first or second position), while in the last two, it is ascending, providing a feeling of pathos. Morotti recognizes a similar pattern in Gozzano’s poems (116–17), both in the use of meters and in their stress. For Baldacci’s analysis, see La musica in italiano: Libretti d’opera dell’Ottocento, 109–117. 76. Lonardi offers an alternative reading of the first three lines of Ungaretti’s poem “Italia” (Il porto sepolto, 1916), which commemorates the sacrifice of all the Italians who died on the front in World War I: “Sono un poeta / un grido unanime / sono un grumo di sogni” (I am a poet / a unanimous cry

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/ I am a tangle of dreams). Lonardi reads the line “Sono un poeta” as yet another rebuttal of Palazzeschi and a reference to Rodolfo’s words in La bohème. Lonardi, 12–13. 77. “My dream of love vanished forever … / My time has come / and I die in desperation! / And I have never loved my life so much!” 78. Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, Musica e letteratura in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento (Florence: Sansoni, 2000). Guarnieri Corazzol is the author of other seminal works, like Sensualità senza carne: La musica nella vita e nell’opera di D’Annunzio (Bologna: il Mulino, 1990), which discusses D’Annunzio’s multifaceted musical ambition. In Tristano mio Tristano: Gli scrittori italiani e il caso Wagner (Bologna: il Mulino, 1988), Guarnieri Corazzol examines Wagner’s impact on Italian culture. A more general study on Italian literature and music is the volume edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Letteratura italiana, Vol. VI: Teatro, musica, tradizione dei classici (Turin: Einaudi, 1986). 79. The volume by Giovanna Gronda and Paolo Fabbri anthologizes librettos throughout the history of Italian opera, from Monteverdi to Luciano Berio, offering the opportunity to study librettos as independent works of literature. Although its bibliography is vast, “libretto studies” cannot be said to constitute a unified discipline. Ulrich Weisstein has attempted to outline a method of analysis of opera librettos as dramatic texts in “Librettology: The Fine Art of Coping with a Chinese Twin,” Heft 5/6 (1982): 23–42. See also Walter Bernhart, ed., Essays on Opera (Leiden: Brill, 2006). For the most part, scholars have focused on individual authors and librettists. A fundamental attempt at a narratological analysis of Verdi’s librettos is Mario Lavagetto’s Quei più modesti romanzi: Il libretto nel melodramma di Verdi (Milan: Garzanti, 1979). On the literary elements of opera librettos, see Luigi Baldacci’s La musica in italiano. Libretti d’opera dell’Ottocento, quoted above. On the metrical and rhythmic elements of Italian opera librettos, see Friedrich Lippmann, Versificazione italiana e ritmo musicale: I rapporti tra verso e musica nell’opera italiana dell’Ottocento (Naples: Liguori, 1986). More recent works on the subject are Paolo Fabbri’s Metro e canto nell’opera italiana (Turin: EDT, 2007) and the volume edited by Ilaria Bonomi and Edoardo Buroni, Il magnifico parassita: Librettisti, libretti e lingua poetica nella storia dell’opera italiana (Rome: Franco Angeli, 2010). 80. This is the case despite the fact that, as Stefano Verdino puts it, they in particular suffered from “mal di melodramma”: “Montale è con Saba il maggior poeta italiano affetto dal mal di melodramma. Per Saba la fedeltà al melodramma condizionò anche la sua poetica e la sua ricerca espressiva di una lingua popolare. Come sempre in Montale, invece, il discorso ha piuttosto carattere privato e individuale” (Montale is with Saba the greatest

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Italian poet affected by the melodrama disease. Saba’s fidelity to melodrama also conditioned his poetics and his expressive search for a popular language. As always in Montale, instead, his love for opera has rather a private and individual character). Stefano Verdino, Montale la musica e i musicisti (Genoa: Sagep Editrice, 1996), 63. 81. For example, Aversano (1984), Iovino and  Verdino (1996), and Lonardi (2003). 82. Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1948). For an exhaustive overview of the history and development of this critical trend, see Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, “Postfazione,” Musica e letteratura in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento, 405–19. Roberto Russi offers a general discussion of the basic principles of melopoetic analysis in Letteratura e musica (Bologna: Carocci, 2005), 7–28. 83. Scher’s most significant contribution is Literatur und Musik. Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes (Berlin: Schmidt, 1984). See also his Verbal Music in German Literature (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1968); “How meaningful is ‘Musical’ in Literary Criticism?,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 21 (1978): 52–6; “Comparing Literature and Music: Current Trends and Prospects in Critical Theory and Methodology,” in Literature and the Other Arts, ed. Steven Paul Scher and Ulrich Weisstein (Innsbruck: Verlag des Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 1981), 215–21; Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 84. Russi, Letteratura e musica, 26–27. 85. Brown amended his original analysis, expanding it into a more effective model. He came to identify four areas of interaction between literature and music: “Combination, Replacement, Influence, Parallel/Analogy.” “Combination” pertains to vocal music, the lied, choral music, and opera— it corresponds roughly to Scher’s “Music and Literature.” “Replacement” pertains to instances of music imitating literature or vice versa. Brown identifies three types of replacement: “analysis,” which is the attempt by an author to analyze a musical composition; “imitation” or an author’s attempt to imitate the effects of music on literary characters; and “interpretation,” which is the description of a piece of music. “Influence” denotes the ­influence of specific musical forms on literature–variations, fugues, leitmotivs, and so on. Finally, “Parallel/Analogy” looks at all the formal elements common to both arts, including not only rhetorical strategies of repetition, variation, and meter, but also the developments of both music and literature across time, following particular schools, styles, and periods. Calvin Brown, “Theoretical Foundations for the Study of the Mutual

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Illumination of the Arts (1984),” in Musico-Poetics in Perspective: Calvin S.  Brown in Memoriam, ed. Jean-Louis Cupers and Ulrich Weisstein (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 281–295. 86. At the center of the critical debates on melopoetics has been the shared desire to find the best methodology to approach the relationship between words and music. The effort to find such a methodology began with Brown and continues today: as a testament to the liveliness of scholarship on this subject, the WMA has documented the evolution of melopoetics publications in their bibliographical collections. Among the most recent contributions is the volume Essays on Word/Music Adaptation and on Surveying the Field, ed. David Francis Urrows (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 87. Werner Wolf. “Musicalized Fiction and Intermediality: Theoretical Aspects of Word and Music Studies,” in Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Graz, 1997, ed. Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher and Werner Wolf (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999), 37–58.

References Primary Sources Brock, Geoffrey, ed. 2012. The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Pascoli, Giovanni. 1939. Poesie. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1979. Testi teatrali inediti, ed. Antonio De Lorenzi. Ravenna: Longo.

Secondary Sources Apollonio, Umbro, ed. 1973. Futurist Manifestos. New York: Viking Press. Ashbrook, William, and Harold Powers. 1991. Puccini’s Turandot. The End of the Great Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Asor Rosa, Alberto. 1986. Letteratura italiana. Vol. VI: Teatro, musica, tradizione dei classici. Turin: Einaudi. Aversano, Mario. 1984. Montale e il libretto d’opera. Naples: Editrice Ferraro. Baldacci, Luigi. 1997. La musica in italiano: Libretti d’opera dell’Ottocento. Milan: Rizzoli. Barilli, Bruno. 1929. Il paese del melodramma. Lanciano: Carabba. Belinfante, David. 1989. Luciano Berio’s Un re in ascolto. The Musical Times 130 (1752): 170–171. Berio, Luciano. 1988. La musicalità di Italo Calvino. Il Verri 5–6: 9–12. Bernhart, Walter, ed. 2006. Essays on Opera. Leiden: Brill.

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Bernhart, Walter, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf, eds. 1999. Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Graz, 1997. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Blakesley, Jacob. 2000. Modern Italian Poets. Translators of the Impossible. Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press. Bonomi, Ilaria, and Edoardo Buroni. 2010. Il magnifico parassita: Librettisti, libretti e lingua poetica nella storia dell’opera italiana. Rome: Franco Angeli. Brown, Calvin S. 1948. Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press. Calvino, Italo. 2002. Sono nato in America… Interviste 1951–1985. Milan: Mondadori. Cazzato, Alessandro. 2011. La musica delle parole: Giovanni Pascoli. Bari: Florestano. Carrozzini, Andrea. 2009. Da Myricae a Odi e inni. Percorsi testuali e tematici della poesia pascoliana. Galatina: Congedo editore. Citron, Marcia. 2014. Opera and Film. In The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer, 44–71. New York: Oxford University Press. Coehlo, Victor. 1994. Marino’s ‘Toccata’ between the Lutenist and the Nightingale. In The sense of Marino: Literature, Fine Arts and Music of the Italian Baroque, ed. Francesco Guardiani, 395–427. New York: Legas. Coletti, Vittorio. 2003. Introduzione all’opera italiana. Turin: Einaudi. D’Antoni, Claudio A. 2007. Il futurismo musicale secondo Francesco Balilla Pratella. Otto/Novecento 1: 27–40. Debenedetti, Alessandro. 1924. Un libretto di G. Pascoli sul ‘Mefistofele.’ Due lettere inedite a Zandonai. Giornale d’Italia. November 7. Di Luzio, Claudia. 2006. Sanguineti e Berio. Suono  – voce  – gesto. Poetiche VIII.3: 529–548. Di Stefano, Alice. 2005. Manzoni e il melodramma: rivoluzione manzoniana, restaurazione melodrammatica. Manziana (Rome): Vecchiarelli. Fabbri, Paolo. 2007. Metro e canto nell’opera italiana. EDT: Turin. Faner, Robert D. 1951. Walt Whitman and Opera. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press. Fisher, Margaret. 2002. Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933. Cambridge: MIT University Press. Glixon, Beth, and Jonathan Glixon. 2006. Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and his World in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gronda, Giovanna, and Paolo Fabbri, eds. 1997. Libretti d’opera italiani. Milan: Mondadori. Guarnieri Corazzol, Adriana. 1988. Tristano, mio Tristano. Gli scrittori italiani e il caso Wagner. Bologna: il Mulino. ———. 1990. Sensualità senza carne: La musica nella vita e nell’opera di D’Annunzio. Il Mulino: Bologna.

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———. 2000. Musica e letteratura in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento. Florence: Sansoni. Iovino, Roberto, and Stefano Verdino, eds. 1996. Montale, la musica e i musicisti. Genoa: Sagep Editrice. Kimbell, David. 1991. Italian Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirkendale, Warren. 2002. La favola della ‘nascita dell’opera’ nella camerata fiorentina demitizzata da Emilio De’ Cavalieri. Rivista Italiana di Musicologia. 37 (1): 131–141. Krieg, Joann P. 1987. Whitman’s Bel Canto Spider. Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 4: 28–30. Lavagetto, Mario. 1979. Quei più modesti romanzi. Il libretto nel melodramma di Verdi. Milan: Garzanti. Lippmann, Friedrich. 1986. Versificazione italiana e ritmo musicale. I rapporti tra verso e musica nell’opera italiana dell’Ottocento. Naples: Liguori. Lonardi, Gilberto. 2003. Fiore dell’addio: Leonora, Manrico e altri fantasmi del melodramma nella poesia di Montale. Bologna: Il Mulino. Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich. 1979. Addenda to ‘Conversation about Dante.’ The Complete Critical Prose and Letters. Trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Martin, Timothy. Fall 2000–Winter 2001. Operatic Joyce. James Joyce Quarterly 38(1/2): 25–43. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. 2013. Giambattista Marino’s Operatic Aesthetics. Word, Image and Song 1: 251–264. Mila, Massimo. 1963. Breve storia della musica. Turin: Einaudi. Montale, Eugenio. 1949. Due artisti di ieri. Corriere della sera. October 29. Montefoschi, Paola. 1995. Metrica e musica pascoliana: L’impossibile trasposizione. Il Verri 3–4: 75–92. Morotti, Silvia. 2007. Il «Teatrino della passione nascosta»: Gozzano e il melodramma. Studi italiani 20 (1): 105–122. ———. 2008. «Il cuore non fiorisce»: Le maschere dell’io e la voce del melodramma nella poesia di Guido Gozzano. The Italianist 1.XXXVII: 93–99. Murray Schafer, Raymond. 1977. Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism. New York: New Directions. Nicastro, Aldo. 1982. Il melodramma e gli italiani. Milan: Rusconi. Palisca, Claude. 1972. The Camerata Fiorentina: A Reappraisal. Studi musicali I: 203–236. ———. 1989. The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1973. Guido Gozzano, Poesie. Tempo August 5. Pintacuda, Salvatore. 1955. Renzo Bossi. Milan: Gastaldi. Pirrotta, Nino. 1954. Temperaments and Tendencies in the Florentine Camerata. The Musical Quarterly XL: 169–189.

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Rillie, John A. M. 1962. Melodramatic Device in T. S. Eliot. The Review of English Studies 13 (51): 267–281. Rosand, Ellen. 1991. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rossi, Luca Carlo. 2013. Leopardi e il melodramma: un incontro mancato. In Ecfrasi musicali. Parole e suono nel Romanticismo italiano, 141–162. Bergamo: Sestante. Russi, Roberto. 2005. Letteratura e musica. Bologna: Carocci. Sanguineti, Edoardo. 1993. Per musica. Modena: Mucchi. ———. 2011. Conversazioni musicali. ed. Roberto Iovino. Rome: Il melangolo. Scher, Steven Paul. 1978. How Meaningful is ‘Musical’ in Literary Criticism? Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 21: 52–56. ———, ed. 1992. Music and Text: Critical Inquiries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scher, Steven Paul, and Ulrich Weisstein, eds. 1981. Comparing Literature and Music: Current Trends and Prospects in Critical Theory and Methodology. In Literature and the other Arts, 215–221. Innsbruck: Verlag des Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck. Zattarin, Alessandro. 2014. Anch’io voglio scrivere per musica. In Pascoli e il melodramma. Lanciano: Carabba. Zazzaroni, Annarita, ed. 2007. Nell’anno Mille attraverso il carteggio Giovanni Pascoli-Renzo Bossi. Studi e problemi di critica testuale. 75: 137–157. ———. 2013. Melodramma senza musica. Giovanni Pascoli, gli abbozzi teatrali e le Canzoni di Re Enzio. Bologna: Patron Editore. ———. 2014. L’incontro con Giovanni Pascoli, librettista e poeta. In Alba d’Aprile. Aspetti della produzione giovanile di Riccardo Zandonai, ed. Diego Cescotti and Irene Comisso, 121–134. Rovereto: Osiride.

CHAPTER 2

From Bayreuth to Fiume: D’Annunzio, Wagner, and the Death of Italian Opera

2.1   D’Annunzio and Opera Gabriele D’Annunzio’s relationship with opera was fraught with dissatisfaction and hostility. On several occasions, D’Annunzio harshly criticized contemporary operatic productions, and in March of 1887, in a three-part article in La tribuna, he went as far as to announce the death of the genre.1 The article, “A proposito della ‘Giuditta’” (“Regarding ‘Giuditta’”), was a review of Stanislao Falchi’s opera Giuditta (1887), which is a four-act adaptation of the biblical Book of Judith. Falchi (1851–1922), a minor composer and music teacher, wrote only a handful of operas in addition to Giuditta. For D’Annunzio, Giuditta embodied the vacuity, absurdity, and uselessness that plagued contemporary Italian operas. In his article D’Annunzio hardly comments at all on the performance he attended, instead making his review an occasion to list the principal shortcomings he sees in Italian opera in general. He decries the sloppiness of Giuditta’s libretto, cluttered as it is with flimsy twists and transparent tricks, a plot intended solely for the cheap amusement of contemporary audiences. The mortal flaw of Giuditta, D’Annunzio announces, is that it is in essence an industrial product, one that soullessly applies trite dramatic formulas to a once dignified art form that seems to have exhausted (“esaurita”) itself. D’Annunzio’s biting pronouncements on Giuditta summarize his view on the state of Italian opera. For D’Annunzio, operas had become mere commodities—the genre was in desperate need of reform. The poet calls © The Author(s) 2020 M. Acetoso, Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46091-4_2

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for a return to opera’s noble origins; he implores his readers to look back to the traditions of opera seria and burletta, sharply contrasting them with the contemporary productions he so disdains. Modern opera, he claims, is too free, too vast, too indefinite, and has lost all connection to true artistic inspiration. The crux of D’Annunzio’s claim lies in the relationship between creator (author and composer) and audience, a relationship that will be the focal point of his reflections on drama, and a key to the development of his own theater. Opera has failed, he believes, because composers have come to lack real artistic goals in their works. They are wholly preoccupied with pleasing audiences, with selling entertainment rather than creating enduring beauty. D’Annunzio contends that the only solution to this impasse is a return to what he considers the peak of the operatic tradition: the second half of the eighteenth century, when the ultimate ambition of composers was artistic expression, bringing the sublime into being through music. The audiences of that era, in turn, possessed a deeper comprehension of the genius of opera, says D’Annunzio: having mastered the intellectual tools to understand and appreciate this art form, they did not need to be entertained at every turn by formulaic librettos, and they understood the plot to be secondary to the score: Il pubblico non chiedeva che sola musica. Non si curava delle parole. Ogni maestro del Settecento aveva musicati quasi tutti i melodrammi di Pietro Metastasio, e spesso due, tre e più volte gli stessi libretti. Il pubblico li sapeva a memoria, cosicché poneva tutta la sua maggiore attenzione alla musica. La musica era nuova, piena d’inaspettate vicende . . . Il libretto non aveva importanza alcuna; la musica era tutto. E la musica del teatro lirico era scritta appositamente per i cantori.2

In this chapter, I will examine D’Annunzio’s conflicted relationship with opera and his ambition to return to its origins, both intellectual and artistic. I will argue that D’Annunzio’s restless discontent with Italian opera came to fuel the formal experimentation of his own art—his ambition to effect a new moment in the European arts with his personal religion of the “Total Work of Art.” After publishing “A proposito della ‘Giuditta,’” D’Annunzio began pursuing an idea for a new art form, one lying at the intersection of literature, music, and theater. This vision would find its fullest articulation in the novel Il fuoco (1900), in which D’Annunzio, inspired by Nietzsche, advocates a revival of Greek Tragedy in Italy. Looking back from Il fuoco, D’Annunzio’s review of Giuditta (otherwise

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a mere footnote in his vast bibliography) can be read as a blueprint for the poet’s striving toward a “total” work of art. The evolution of this striving must be understood in light of D’Annunzio’s deep initial admiration for Richard Wagner (1813–1883). As I will show, D’Annunzio’s musical ambition was guided by a desire to surpass Wagner’s model. D’Annunzio began to conceive of a Mediterranean tragedy that would reach back to the origins of Italian opera. As part of this project, he would seek to build a performance space in the heart of the Mediterranean landscape, a theater that could rival Wagner’s Festival House in Bayreuth. This vision never materialized, and indeed haunted the poet for the remainder of his career, an unrealized idea that had symbolized his personal commitment to music, his ambition to correct the shortcomings of contemporary opera. D’Annunzio’s dynamic with Wagner would have consequences for subsequent generations of Italian poets—in later chapters, I will demonstrate this by looking at Saba and Montale’s challenge to D’Annunzio’s cumbersome influence.

2.2   Opera Verista In his review of Giuditta, D’Annunzio portrays his current age as one of transition, one that foreshadowed a coming artistic renaissance. He was indeed writing in a moment of profound change, both for Italian opera and for his own artistic path. In February of 1887, Verdi’s Otello had premiered, cementing Verdi’s return to the scene after a long hiatus, but also heralding the end of one of the most successful periods in Italian opera. A few years later (1890), Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana would introduce Italian audiences to verismo, a brief trend in Italian opera that marked a radical break with the conventions of previous composers. Verismo was inspired by the homonymous literary movement, which pursued a new objective representation of the phenomenal world. D’Annunzio rejected this movement, and his hostility toward it would fuel his own art. For D’Annunzio, in fact, these were years of crucial experimentation and artistic renovation.3 He was living in Rome, frequenting society events and indulging in a glamorous lifestyle. In 1888, he published his first novel, Il piacere, a work that immortalized the splendor of his Roman years and introduced elements of European Decadentism to Italian literature. A few years later, with the publication of Poema paradisiaco (1893), he sought to overcome the poetic models of previous generations by creating a newly musical poetic voice, a force of originality and experimentation. A few

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years later, the poet would discover his vocation in theater, writing his first set of tragedies. When D’Annunzio claimed to foresee a renaissance for Italian opera, he was not only calling for a reform of the conventions of opera itself, but also predicting a novel means of uniting music and literature, and giving notice that he himself intended to be the one to chart the new path. D’Annunzio’s prominent status in modern Italian literature cannot be understated. A complete intellectual, a man who devoted his life to multiple forms of artistic expression, he stood as an example of a figure who consummately merged his aesthetic ideals with his own life. He was involved in all the main poetic movements of his time, from verismo (by virtue of his opposition to it) to Symbolism and Decadentism. He would prove crucial for the development of the next generation of intellectuals, both through deliberate influence and through their reactions to his work. The best summation of D’Annunzio’s importance for Italian culture comes from Montale: D’Annunzio nella recente tradizione italiana è un poco come Hugo nella posterità francese, da Baudelaire in giù: è presente in tutti perché ha sperimentato o sfiorato tutte le possibilità stilistiche e prosodiche del nostro tempo. In questo senso non aver appreso nulla da lui sarebbe un pessimo segno.4

Aside from this general preeminence in Italian letters, D’Annunzio was peerless in the extent of his musical influences.5 Music represented for D’Annunzio the highest of all art forms, an ideal to which to aspire. Through the influence of French Symbolism, music informed first and foremost his poetic production, in particular Poema paradisiaco and Alcyone (1903). But beyond this, D’Annunzio’s longtime dream was in fact to become an actual musician. He both studied music and worked as a music critic, and over the course of his life, he became concerned with increasingly complex theoretical issues regarding the nature of music. He maintained close relationships with musicians and musicologists: for the musical setting of his poems, he collaborated with composers like Mascagni, Debussy, and Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968). Unable to realize his dream of a career in music, he would write about music and society (for a short period, during his Roman years) for several periodicals, including Cronaca bizantina, Fanfulla quotidiano, Capitan Fracassa and, of course, La tribuna.6 His experiments with the mixing of poetry, prose,

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and theater can be understood as both an extension of and a substitute for his failed musical aspirations. In a passage of his autobiographical Libro segreto (1935), D’Annunzio captures the extent to which music shaped his worldview and contributed to his literary vocation. The passage describes his first encounter with instrumental music—a tragic epiphany that connected him with the secret harmonics of the universe. The event was a mythic rebirth, an intellectual and sensory christening. D’Annunzio (as a young boy) visits the church of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna with his father, and upon entering the building, the future poet is suddenly overcome by the sound of an organ as it plays sacred music: Il tuono dell’organo rintronò sul mio capo, improvviso come lo scoppio del temporale; e l’atrio ne tremò come se il nembo del dolore si rinforzasse a scrollarlo . . . Riudivo la mia voce in me come la melodia de’ miei colloqui con ella. Ero divenuto uno strumento nelle mani del musico invisibile . . . era come se il Palestrina prendesse in me la mia angoscia mortale e purificasse il soffio tempestante dall’opera di Nicolò dell’Arca e ne facesse la sua armonia tragica . . . In quel punto io nacqui alla musica, ebbi la mia natività nella musica infinita, ebbi nella musica la mia natività e la mia sorte. In una comunione di pianto s’era iniziata la mia vita seconda. Un’altra incominciava, per la discorde concordia delle medesime virtù, più viva e più vera della mia seconda e della mia prima.7

The music was the “Peccantem me quotidie” by Pierluigi Palestrina (1525–1594), a madrigalist and one of the sixteenth-century fathers of Italian polyphony.8 Palestrina sought to reconcile the formal innovation of polyphony with the precepts of the post-reformation Catholic Church. “Peccantem me quotidie” is one of his most canonical and popular works. The theme of this motet—the daily transgressions and inner struggle of a lustful sinner—perhaps resonated with D’Annunzio’s own inner turmoil over the contradictions between his licentious lifestyle and his lofty aesthetic ideals. D’Annunzio’s account of this epiphany sought to assert in hindsight the musical roots of his artistic vocation. Most importantly, this episode illustrates the ambiguity that marked the poet’s relationship to music. On the one hand, D’Annunzio presents music as an idea, an intellectual organization of the phenomenal world; on the other hand, he characterizes music as a physical occurrence, the product of musical instruments,

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something felt in the body. These two modes of understanding are interconnected: for D’Annunzio, the physical experience of hearing Palestrina’s motet on an organ leads to the revelation of an alternative, extra-sensorial dimension of pure intellect. This interconnection finds its way into D’Annunzio’s writing in two crucial elements: musical art as a theme (within the plots and motifs of his works), and the musicality of his words and phrasings. The latter—particularly prominent in his poetry—is the heritage of European Romanticism and Symbolism, inspired by Baudelaire’s idea of language as the key with which to decipher the forest of symbols that make up the world.

2.3   Music and Words It was D’Annunzio, more than any other author, who bridged the gap between the Italian poetry of the nineteenth century and that of the twentieth century, linking the generation of Italian poets exemplified by Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907) to the subsequent European anxiety for a renovation of poetic language (the central ambition of Symbolism). In his poetry, D’Annunzio sought to overcome the limitations of semantics, to refine words into pure sounds. As illustrated by Guarneri Corazzol, D’Annunzio found in the correspondences between words a secret organization of the sensory world, one that could be unveiled only by music.9 D’Annunzio saw the world itself as a secret harmony that art works to uncover, an idea rooted in the theorizations of the Romantics and then elaborated by the French Symbolists, in particular Baudelaire and Mallarmé, who would later play an instrumental role in the development of D’Annunzio’s Wagnerism.10 Several commentators have stressed the musicality of D’Annunzio’s poetry. In the case of Poema paradisiaco, scholars have focused in particular on his metrical choices, as well as his desire to transcend semantics—the meanings of words—and revel in the music of prosody.11 In D’Annunzio’s lyricism, one sees the influence of Paul Verlaine and the priority of music in his “Art Poétique” (1882). However, as Massimo Della Sciucca has demonstrated, Poema paradisiaco also exhibits a stratification of musical techniques, part of D’Annunzio’s desire for a stylistic renovation that would mirror what he saw in contemporary music.12 Instrumental music, for instance, is the theme of several of the collection’s poems, a number of which bear the titles of actual musical compositions: “Sopra un ‘Erotik’ (di Edvard Grieg),” “Ancora sopra l”Erotik,’” “Sopra un ‘Adagio’ (di

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Johannes Brahms),” “Sopra un’aria antica,” and “Romanza della donna velata.” The perception of a deeper dimension in music, which D’Annunzio explores in the church organ scene of Libro segreto—the nexus of the intellectual and the sensory—is prominent as a theme in his poetry. As Raffaele Mellace has argued, music for D’Annunzio is both a key to the interpretation of reality and a source of poetic inspiration.13 In Poema paradisiaco’s “Consolazione” (1891), for example, the sound of a harpsicord triggers a fond memory: music is portrayed as a point of connection to the past. In Elettra, the second of his Laudi, D’Annunzio pays homage to Giuseppe Verdi and Vincenzo Bellini, commemorating their intellectual contributions to the Italian “genius.”14 And in Alcyone, D’Annunzio gives fullest expression to his musical aspirations, offering his most comprehensive combination of the intellectual and the sensory. This book—the third of the Laudi—is widely regarded as D’Annunzio’s greatest achievement, a cornerstone of twentieth-century Italian poetry. Alberto Bertoni stresses this collection’s eclecticism, for him an indicator of its modernity, and he sees the book’s musical thematics as an effort to craft an original form of oral expression, where the metrical fabric of a given work is akin to a musical score.15 In “La pioggia nel pineto,” the poet portrays a summer landscape as an ensemble of musical instruments, an orchestra playing a symphony to which he seeks to tune himself. The poem is dense with rhetorical figures—rhymes, assonances, and onomatopoeias, effecting a rich and complex phonetic texture. This texture, a linguistic approximation of the symphony in which the poet and his lover become immersed through the landscape, is exemplary of D’Annunzio’s merging of idea and sense, meaning and body. Music is likewise a central feature of D’Annunzio’s novels. His overarching artistic ambition was the union of art and life, and he felt that the lives of musicians embodied this ideal most fully. In many of D’Annunzio’s novels, characters are either musicians or music lovers: the melomaniac Andrea Sperelli (Il piacere), the musician Giorgio Aurispa (Il trionfo della morte), the playwright Stelio Effrena (Il fuoco), and his cohort of followers. These alter-egos embody both D’Annunzio’s fervor for music and his intellectual aspirations. Through an abundance of musical vocabulary and metaphor, the frequent presence of musical instruments, and frequent references to composers, music becomes a kind of fabric in D’Annunzio’s novels. Musical performances are often plot devices,16 but his novels also retain the Symbolist lyricism of his poems. Specific works of music also act

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as motifs: in Il piacere, for example, a Gavotte by Rameau appears throughout, signaling the theme of adulterous passion. In L’innocente (1891), recurring references to an aria from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (“Che farò senz’Euridice,” III) are always connected to the theme of guilt.17 As Guarnieri Corazzol has shown, these musical motifs are crucial to the development of D’Annunzio’s characters, vehicles of their moral evolution. Guarnieri Corazzol takes care to note that D’Annunzio had used this technique before encountering Wagner’s music. After L’innocente, once D’Annunzio’s infatuation with Wagner had ignited, the poet became even more deliberate in his use of musical themes as he sought to reproduce Wagner’s leitmotifs, something we see in particular in Il trionfo della morte and Il fuoco, which I examine later in this chapter. From an early age, D’Annunzio took piano lessons, and while attending boarding school he began vocal studies. But despite what seems to have been a serious ambition, he was never able to become a performer. He was, however, able to stay connected to the musical world by reviewing plays and concerts when he moved to Rome.18 As has been noted, in his music criticism D’Annunzio kept in line with contemporary scholarly trends, in particular through his hostility toward verismo.19 In the end, his reviews are of little musicological relevance, dealing primarily with the society surrounding music—keeping track, for example, of who did and who did not attend concerts. This has prompted some scholars to highlight the incompleteness of his musical education.20 But D’Annunzio’s interest in concertgoers and their culture can also point us to his deeper concerns, for it would be the people of the music world that would keep him (and his writing) close to the concert hall throughout his life. D’Annunzio maintained personal relationships with numerous musicians, composers, and musicologists,21 frequenting the most fashionable social circles and music salons during his Roman (1883–1890) and Neapolitan (1890–1894) years. But even more formative was his attendance of the so-called “Cenacolo di Francavilla” (“Cenacle of Francavilla”) during his years of artistic apprenticeship in his homeland, the central/ southern Italian region of Abruzzo. This group of artists, intellectuals, and musicians gathered regularly in a Franciscan convent owned by the painter Francesco Paolo Michetti (1851–1929), a close friend and collaborator of D’Annunzio’s. The poet would later recall the time he spent in this group with affection, pointing to their secluded collaboration as a model for the communion of all arts that was his lifelong vision. And his relationships with the group’s members would survive the changing

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musical trends and the fleeting passions that often diverted the poet’s attention. A key example of this is his friendship with one of the central figures in the Cenacolo’s meetings, the composer Francesco Paolo Tosti (1846–1916), with whom D’Annunzio remained close throughout his life.22 For D’Annunzio, Tosti’s music harkened back to the primordial union of meaning and sensation. In “Un poeta melico” (“A Melic Poet”), D’Annunzio declares that Tosti’s “romanze da camera” were among the most beautiful ever written and that the composer was the very embodiment of the Mediterranean spirit.23 Admiration was followed by successful collaboration, especially with Tosti’s popular “A vucchella” (“Little Mouth,” 1892), for which D’Annunzio wrote the lyrics in Neapolitan dialect. As Guarnieri Corazzol sees it, D’Annunzio’s connection to Tosti and his music came to represent the poet’s primordial bond to Abruzzo.24 But most importantly, D’Annunzio’s esteem for Tosti would serve as a model for his later and more fraught admiration of Wagner.

2.4   Wagner It was during D’Annunzio’s Roman and Neapolitan years that Wagner became the object of his deep fascination. Since the 1850s, Wagner had been a wildly popular if polarizing figure throughout Europe. Reactions to Wagner ranged from frenzied devotion to total rejection, and Italy was not immune to the mania.25 Talk of Wagner entered Italian literary circles before those of musicians and music critics, due largely to the influence of French culture, the filter through which Wagner reached Italy. D’Annunzio’s first encounter with Wagner’s music was a performance of Lohengrin that he reviewed for La Tribuna in 1884.26 On this occasion, the poet was unimpressed by the opera’s musical quality, and paid most of his attention to the set, costumes, and the quality of acting—in his review he even omits the name of the composer. Previously, D’Annunzio had criticized the blind pursuit of innovation that Wagner had come to represent.27 Although he gave credit to the clarity of vision he found in Wagner’s work, juxtaposing it to the disarrayed state of contemporary Italian opera, his assessment was overwhelmingly negative, presenting Wagner as someone who had sacrificed art for novelty. But D’Annunzio’s conversion would come in 1892, when he discovered Tristan und Isolde (1865). The opera was first performed at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna in 188828—it is unlikely that D’Annunzio

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attended the premiere, but at some point near the middle of his Neapolitan period, the poet became obsessed with the opera. This again was likely influenced by the trends of French culture, but was sustained by D’Annunzio’s friendship with musician and intellectual Niccolò Van Westerhout (1857–1898),29 at whose many private recitals the poet repeatedly requested piano performances of the Tristan und Isolde score.30 D’Annunzio was in particular an admirer of Wagner’s librettos. Above and beyond the music, he was taken by the literary quality of Wagner’s works, and (in stark contrast to his first assessment) offered Wagner as the best case for the auto-librettist as remedy for the cultural impasse at which he felt Italian opera had arrived.31 It is thus no surprise that Wagner’s influence on D’Annunzio would be primarily textual, most prominently seen in the latter’s novels. This influence comes in the form of the Leitmotif technique mentioned above.32 The term was used by early commentators on Wagner’s operas,33 but D’Annunzio himself at this point had not likely analyzed Wagner’s technique enough to single it out. D’Annunzio, in other words, perceived and appropriated the technique organically, likely with the help of the Symbolist models of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, whom both he and Wagner admired.34 D’Annunzio’s Wagnerism reached its fullest expression with the novel Il trionfo della morte (1894), the final installment of the so-called Romanzi della Rosa (Trilogy of the Rose). Inspired by Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, Il trionfo della morte is centered on the superhuman ambitions of Giorgio Aurispa, a young artist who leaves his Abruzzo hometown (Guardiagrele) to pursue artistic glory in Rome. In the capital, Giorgio becomes romantically involved with a married woman, Ippolita Sanzio—the affair and ensuing scandal echo the tragic plot of Tristan und Isolde both implicitly and explicitly. In the book’s final chapter, Giorgio and Ippolita are together in a small convent overlooking a cliff in the seaside town of San Vito Chietino, desperate to escape the gossip and intrigue of the city. They lock themselves in their room and play piano—an introduction by Schumann, an “Improvviso” by Chopin—and soon become intoxicated by the music and the emotions it stirs.35 They eventually attain an elevated state of communion, their bodies and souls mutually under the command of the music they play, a rapture finally brought on by a passage from Tristan und Isolde’s prelude: Ma nel preludio del Tristano e Isolda l’anelito dell’amore verso la morte irrompeva con una veemenza inaudita, il desiderio insaziabile si esaltava in

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un’ebrezza di distruzione. “…Per bere laggiù in onor tuo la coppa dell’amore eterno, io voleva consacrarti con me sul medesimo altare alla morte.” E in quell’immenso vortice di armonie li avviluppò entrambi irresistibilmente, li serrò, li trascinò; li rapì nel “meraviglioso impero.”36

D’Annunzio went as far as to refer to Il trionfo della morte as a “literary paraphrase” of Tristan und Isolde.37 In the novel’s conclusion, Giorgio pushes Ippolita off the cliff before throwing himself over it, consummating the couple’s full abandonment to music by enacting the fate of Wagner’s tragic lovers. In D’Annunzio’s own art, he sought to imitate Wagner’s model above all in terms of the ideal of the “total work of art,”38 what Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk.39 D’Annunzio saw in Wagner a champion of the interweaving of different artistic media, and he sought to reproduce this interweaving in the genre of the novel—in his dedication of Il trionfo della morte to Michetti, D’Annunzio proposes a renovation of the contemporary novel, using language that echoes Wagner’s theoretical writings: Avevamo più volte insieme ragionato d’un ideal libro di prosa moderno che – essendo vario di suoni e di ritmi come un poema, riunendo nel suo stile le più diverse varietà della parola scritta – armonizzasse tutte le varietà del mistero; alternasse le precisioni della scienza alle seduzioni del sogno; sembrasse non imitare ma continuare la Natura; libero dai vincoli della favola, portasse alfine in sé creata con tutti i mezzi dell’arte letteraria la particolar vita – sensuale sentimentale intellettuale – di un essere umano collocato nel centro della vita universale.40

D’Annunzio’s answer to the Wagnerian model was his vision of the “novel of the future” (recalling Wagner’s “Artwork of the Future”), a work that would unite different art forms within itself. He did not see the “total work of art” as a matter of mere style, but as a way for art to transcend the imitation of nature by participating in it. With this idea D’Annunzio returns to Nietzsche’s Übermensch—the individual’s transcendence of common morality. Indeed, Il trionfo della morte’s epigraph is a quote from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886): There are books that have inverse values for soul and for health, depending on whether they are used by the lower souls and lowlier life-forces, or by the higher and more powerful ones. In the first case, these books are dangerous and cause deterioration and dissolution; in the second case, they are the heralds’ calls that summon the most courageous to their courage.41

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After Il trionfo della morte, D’Annunzio began to conceive of a hybrid novel that would embrace the lyricism of poetry. After a long gestation, he finally published Le vergini delle rocce in 1895. The novel was to be the first installment of the Trilogia del Giglio (The Lily Trilogy), which D’Annunzio never completed. While Le vergini delle rocce is profoundly influenced by Wagner’s trinity of Wort-Ton-Drama, D’Annunzio also returns to the concept of the Übermensch with a more mature perspective. The novel’s protagonist, Claudio Cantelmo, is a nobleman burdened by his family lineage—his ancestors were generals and noblemen, and he feels simultaneously unworthy of his name and preoccupied with a sense of great responsibility. He comes to feel that he must father a child who would revive the greatness of his progenitors by transcending the strictures of bourgeois existence (a definition of heroism that points to D’Annunzio’s own constant longing to escape the dullness of everyday life). D’Annunzio’s admiration for both Nietzsche and Wagner was such that when the two came into opposition he felt compelled to respond: in 1893, when the poet first read Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner (Der Fall Wagner, 1888), he published a series of three articles in La Tribuna,42 ultimately defending Wagner from the philosopher’s attack. It is worth reviewing the history of Nietzsche’s book to give a clearer picture of its impact on D’Annunzio.

2.5   Nietzsche and Wagner In his first major philosophical work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872), Nietzsche had asserted that “art derives its continuous development from the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian; just as the reproduction of species depends on the duality of the sexes.” He was speaking with reference to the tragedies of the Greeks, “who revealed the profound mysteries of their artistic doctrines to the discerning mind, not in concepts but in the vividly clear forms of their deities.” Two key deities, Apollo and Dionysus, gods of art, are locked in a “tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.”43 Nietzsche believed that the fifth century BC in Greece was a unique moment in the history of Western culture, a brief window when the Apollonian and Dionysian “seem[ed] to be coupled” in a perfect balance. This era thus produced the only art form that was able to reconcile both elements: Attic tragedy. Nietzsche believed

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that these tragedies, with their timeless insights into the complexity of the human condition, were overthrown after Aeschylus and Sophocles, when an age of rationality was introduced by Socrates and championed by Euripides and his tragedies. For Nietzsche, this new imbalance in favor of the Apollonian heralded the “death of tragedy,” the loss of the possibility of fully expressing human suffering in art. But as he concludes the book, he predicts the rebirth of that possibility, that balance of the two gods, with the opera of Wagner. This statement came after many years of friendship with Wagner, who shared Nietzsche’s Schopenhauerian intellectual formation, and to whom Nietzsche dedicated The Birth of Tragedy. But the friendship ended in 1878 with the publication of Human, All Too Human, where Nietzsche first exhibits what would grow into a deep disdain for the composer. Nietzsche had already hinted at this in a section of Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, 1876) called “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” but in The Case of Wagner the attack is unconcealed and biting. Nietzsche recants his praise of Wagner in The Birth of Tragedy and labels the composer as the embodiment of the two “diseases” of modern civilization: decadence and nihilism.44 Nietzsche’s final attack on Wagner comes in 1895, in Nietzsche contra Wagner, where he derides the sudden presence of Christianity in what would be the composer’s late work, in particular Parsifal (1882).45 When D’Annunzio first read Der Fall Wagner in 1893, it was at the peak of his fascination with Wagner. In his La Tribuna articles, D’Annunzio defends Wagner on the basis of two points: the artistic merit of his music, which D’Annunzio believes to be self-evident and above any ideological critique by Nietzsche; and the timeliness of Wagner’s work, which in D’Annunzio’s view is unparalleled in its trueness to the spirit of the age. For D’Annunzio, this means a trueness to the “modern melancholy”: Soltanto alla musica è oggi dato esprimere i sogni che nascono nelle profondità della malinconia moderna, i pensieri indefiniti, i desideri senza limiti, le ansie senza causa, le disperazioni inconsolabili, tutti i turbamenti più oscuri e più angosciosi . . . Riccardo Wagner non soltanto ha raccolto nella sua opera tutta questa spiritualità e questa idealità sparse intorno a lui, ma ­interpretando il nostro bisogno metafisico, ha rivelato a noi stessi la parte più occulta della nostra vita.46

For D’Annunzio, Wagner was able to reach into the innermost, normally unintelligible aspects of human existence and bring them to light.

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Although he openly sided with the composer in these articles, it would later become clear that D’Annunzio was struggling with the opposing pulls of Wagner and Nietzsche. As Tedeschi argues, D’Annunzio hoped to transcend the idiosyncrasies of the two, inhabiting neither the sunlit kingdom of Zarathustra nor the nightscape of Tristan: he sought to overcome the limitations of this intellectual dichotomy.47 But even here—in the concept of “overcoming”—we can see Zarathustran shades, and this episode would ultimately set the stage for D’Annunzio’s own break with Wagner. After the publication of Il trionfo della morte, D’Annunzio entered a new phase of musical and philosophical ideas, stepping away from Wagner and aligning himself more closely with Nietzsche’s positions on music and national identity. Between 1896 and 1897, D’Annunzio read a doctoral dissertation on the origin of lyrical theater, written by Romain Rolland (1866–1944), renowned musicologist and man of letters.48 Rolland advocated a return to polyphony and the musical experimentations of the Italian Renaissance, and D’Annunzio began to see in this concept a viable alternative to Wagnerism. Indeed, during his first meeting with Rolland in 1897, D’Annunzio voiced his growing dissatisfaction with both Wagner’s music and his ideas.49 This sentiment seemed redoubled in August of that same year, when in another article in La tribuna D’Annunzio first speculated on the notion of a Mediterranean alternative to Wagner’s theater in Bayreuth. The article, “La rinascenza della tragedia” (“The Rebirth of Tragedy”), celebrates the recent restauration of an old Roman theater— the Teatro di Arausio, originally built in I BC—in the Provençal town of Orange (Vaucluse, France). D’Annunzio declares this restauration the inauguration of a new era, an awakening of the Latinate spirit: the theater is immersed in the Mediterranean landscape—like the Theater of Dionysus next to the Acropolis—and will let the voice of the original Greek tragedy reverberate again. Once more, D’Annunzio takes the opportunity to attack the commodification of contemporary opera, declaring poets the elected few who would revive drama in the future.50

2.6   D’Annunzio’s Dream: The “Teatro di Festa” and the “Total Work of Art” In 1897, D’Annunzio moved to bring about this future himself, announcing his plans for the construction of a theater on the shore of Lake Albano, a few miles outside Rome. This theater was to be christened “Teatro di Festa” and was largely the product of the poet’s tormented

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relationship—professional and romantic—with the world-renowned actress Eleonora Duse (1858–1924).51 D’Annunzio envisioned this theater—an open-air space in the remote beauty of the Roman countryside— as the harbinger of the revival of the ancient Mediterranean spirit. The tragedy Persephone, scheduled for March 21, 1899, would have been the first performance held.52 Although the restored theater of Orange was an important source of inspiration, D’Annunzio’s theater was above all a statement about Bayreuth, which in 1876 had seen the opening of Wagner’s Festspielhaus (and where even after Wagner’s death only his operas would be played). This statement is implicit in D’Annunzio’s repeated emphasis on the theater’s connection to Mediterranean culture and (literally) landscape, which he felt had a far stronger claim (than the cult of Wagner) on the musical spirit that could foster a “re-birth” of Attic tragedy.53 But the theater in Albano would never be built: it would exist only on the pages of D’Annunzio’s novel Il fuoco. The book’s protagonist is yet another alter ego of D’Annunzio, a young ambitious poet named Stelio Effrena. Scattered throughout the narrative are Stelio’s contemplations, thoughts, and aphorisms on music and musical theory, fragments that can be read as excerpts of D’Annunzio’s aesthetic credo. The novel’s hybrid form is part and parcel of D’Annunzio’s idealization of the “total work of art,” the book’s narrative touching on all the major art forms and alluding to various literary predecessors. Il fuoco is D’Annunzio’s final push to distance himself from the formal conventions of the eighteenth-century Italian novel, to overcome the intellectual limitations and stylistic premises of Naturalism. Most importantly, in marking his complete break with Wagner, Il fuoco opens a new phase in D’Annunzio’s relationship with music and theater. The break is, nonetheless, not without pathos: the novel’s final pages depict Wagner’s actual funeral, at which Stelio is one of the few elects to participate in the final procession. Part of Il fuoco’s break with Wagner is a return to Nietzschean themes. It is a complex reunion—D’Annunzio seems eager to assert his position on Nietzsche by means of critique, emphasizing his divergence from The Birth of Tragedy by reiterating Italian opera’s more primordial connection to the Mediterranean “spirit of music” than the composer Nietzsche had championed: L’opera di Riccardo Wagner . . . è fondata sullo spirito germanico, è d’essenza puramente settentrionale. La sua riforma ha qualche analogia con

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quella tentata da Lutero. Il suo dramma non è se non il fiore supremo del genio d’una stirpe, non è se non il compendio straordinariamente efficace delle aspirazioni che affaticarono l’anima dei sinfoneti e dei poeti nazionali, dal Bach al Beethoven, dal Wieland al Goethe. Se voi immaginaste la sua opera su le rive del Mediterraneo, tra i nostri chiari olivi, tra i nostri lauri svelti, sotto la gloria del cielo latino, la vedreste impallidire e dissolversi.54

But even this is not so much a critique of Nietzsche as a re-enactment of the philosopher’s own palinode with Wagner. And ultimately, in its transcendence of The Birth of Tragedy, Il fuoco embraces a Zarathustran ethics of overcoming.55 In the following passage, Stelio reflects on the need to move beyond the chorus of ancient tragedy: Io non voglio risuscitare una forma antica; voglio inventare una forma nuova, obbedendo soltanto al mio istinto e al genio della mia stirpe, così come fecero i Greci quando crearono quel meraviglioso edificio di bellezza, non imitabile, che è il loro dramma. Poiché da tempo le tre arti pratiche, la musica, la poesia e la danza, si sono disgiunte . . . Io penso che non sia più possibile fonderle in una sola struttura ritmica senza togliere a taluna il carattere proprio e dominante ormai acquistato . . . Tra tutte le materie atte ad accogliere il ritmo, la Parola è il fondamento di ogni opera d’arte che tenda alla perfezione. Stimi tu che nel dramma wagneriano sia riconosciuto alla Parola tutto il suo valore?56

Beyond such open declarations, D’Annunzio’s dialogue with Nietzsche can be seen in Il fuoco’s various thematic oppositions—such as night and day, as Giuseppe Mazzotta has shown57—which evoke the dialectic of the Dionysian (instinct and uncontrolled passion) and the Apollonian (the rationality that tames and organizes those instincts). Again, stress is laid on how the Mediterranean spirit is the key to the reconciliation of the dialectic’s two sides—one element of Stelio’s theater plan is to build a temple dedicated to Apollo on the Janiculum hill, the Romanness of which he contrasts with Wagner’s Frankish “temple” in Bayreuth: Bayreuth!—interruppe il principe Hoditz.—No; il Gianicolo,—gridò Stelio Èffrena uscendo all’improvviso dal suo silenzio vertiginoso—un colle romano. Non il legno e il mattone dell’Alta Franconia; noi avremo sul colle romano un teatro di marmo.58

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In the long run, D’Annunzio’s break with Wagner would free him from the need to surpass the composer with the formal innovations of the “novel of the future.” In his novels following Il fuoco—Forse che sì, forse che no (1910) and Notturno (1921)—he would return to a more intimate and autobiographical register. But his Nietzschean ambition would live on in his plays. While D’Annunzio was writing some of his most noted works— Il Fuoco59 and the Laudi (between 1899 and 1903)—he was also steadily producing plays. It was in these plays, more and more, that he aired his opinions on questions of formal experimentalism, national identity, and the famed “rebirth of tragedy.” D’Annunzio’s first true attempt to create a modern tragedy—both a “total work of art” and a revival of Greek tragedy—was La città morta (1896).60 This work synthesizes D’Annunzio’s theoretical position in “La rinascenza della tragedia” (later articulated through the voice of Stelio Effrena).61 La città morta was first performed in Paris in 1898 (translated into French), with the most popular French actress of the time, Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), in the lead role of Bianca Maria.62 It was reprised three years later in Milan (now in Italian), with Eleonora Duse as Bianca Maria. The play, a tragedy, recounts the story of a group of archeologists digging among the ruins of Mycenae in search of Agamemnon’s lost palace. This premise was inspired by the discovery and excavation of Troy and Mycenae Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890). During a regatta to Greece with Duse and the poet Edoardo Scarfoglio (1860–1917), D’Annunzio even sought to retrace the steps of the German archeologist. This trip is said to have played a large role in inspiring D’Annunzio’s fixation on Greek tragedy, but also important was his study of Sophocles’ Antigone, and his reading of the works of Angelo Conti (1860–1931), a writer and scholar of theater.63 While Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is clearly also central,64 D’Annunzio does not want his plays to merely mimic Greek drama but to recapture its grandeur by breaking new ground. As Valentini has noted, there is an avant-garde element in his tragedies,65 as D’Annunzio hones his dramatic craft by experimenting with various genres, time periods, and settings.66 While La città morta is set in modern times, Fedra (1905, a reproduction of the Phaedra myth) is set in ancient Greece, and Francesca da Rimini (1901, based on Canto V of Dante’s Inferno), is set in medieval Italy. D’Annunzio places La figlia di Iorio (1904) and La fiaccola sotto il moggio (1905) in his own native Abruzzo, while La gioconda (1898) and Più che l’amore (1906) take place in cosmopolitan, bourgeois settings.

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Though the reactions to his plays were mixed, D’Annunzio managed to reach both critics and audiences at different points. As Giuseppe Antonio Borgese observes, the fundamental motive fueling D’Annunzio’s theatrical output (aside from a persistent lack of money) was to surpass the subjectivity of the written page by embracing a direct, ritualized relationship with an audience (a point that does much to explain the grandiosity of D’Annunzio’s “Teatro di Festa” idea).67 This notion of a ritualized creator/spectator communion is illustrated by an 1897 speech D’Annunzio gave in Ortona, during the Italian parliamentary campaign that would inaugurate his political career. The speech—later known as the “Discorso della siepe” (the “Hedge Speech”)68—helped seal his victory. In it (as Lorenzini highlights) the poet draws a parallel between theater and politics by adding a third analogue: the ritual of the liturgy.69 In Il fuoco, D’Annunzio will use the myth of Perseus to explain this idea more fully. During a discussion with Stelio Effrena on spectatorship and drama, the character Daniele Glauro exclaims: “Il gesto di Perseo! . . . Alla fine della tragedia tu recidi il capo della Moira e lo mostri al popolo sempre giovine e sempre novello che chiude lo spettacolo con alte grida.”70 Glauro’s implication—that theater should be like a revealing of the Medusa’s decapitated head to elicit a reaction from the audience—encapsulates D’Annunzio’s emphasis on the theater as a collective, participatory ritual. In “A proposito della ‘Giuditta,’” D’Annunzio had in fact explained his dissatisfaction with contemporary opera precisely in terms of the flawed relationship between the composer and the audience. Part of the way he hoped to mend this relationship was to have his theatrical works set to music, continuing to advance his general ambition of reintroducing music into other artistic genres (thereby reviving Mediterranean tragedy and extending his critique of verismo and melodrama).71 He collaborated frequently with musicians and composers, some of whom he had previously disparaged. In 1894, following the success of Manon Lescaut, Giacomo Puccini asked D’Annunzio to create an original libretto for a new opera. Puccini was at that time a rising star, whereas D’Annunzio was a literary celebrity whose participation would certainly have boosted the former’s career. D’Annunzio, moreover, was at the peak of his fascination with Wagner and scoffed at the idea of collaborating with Puccini. He changed his mind, however, just a few years later.72 In 1906, the two met and discussed their ideas on opera, finding a surprising amount of common ground. But their many projected collaborations (including an adaptation of Parisina and an original work entitled La Rosa del Cipro) would never

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materialize—too many differences remained between the two. D’Annunzio and Puccini would meet a final time in 1912. Puccini, still in admiration of D’Annunzio’s relentless pursuit of innovation, again asked him to collaborate on an original libretto in a multi-authored triptych. Even this, however, would never come to fruition.73 In 1913, Pietro Mascagni, arguably the father of Italian verismo, wrote a musical score for D’Annunzio’s tragedy Parisina, inspired by Lord Byron’s homonymous poem (1816). When announced, this partnership was met by incredulity from audiences and critics.74 Several years earlier (in the article “Il capobanda”) D’Annunzio had attacked Mascagni, calling him the principal cause of the disease that afflicted Italian opera, a symbol of the industrial nature of contemporary productions, a businessman rather than an artist.75 But their collaboration would prove to be a productive one. When they first met, Mascagni had just premiered Iris—an opera closer to European Symbolism than to verismo—and he was looking for ways to expand his musical horizons. He became fascinated by D’Annunzio’s ideas on theater, and even though he rejected a preliminary collaboration offer—an idea for a loose adaptation of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato—he warmly welcomed the idea of scoring Parisina (the same work that D’Annunzio had originally envisioned with the music of Puccini). The opera premiered at La Scala in Milan on December 15, 1913, and was met with respect and admiration from both the public and critics.76 The year before—1912—D’Annunzio had collaborated with Riccardo Zandonai (1883–1944), a student of Mascagni and an acolyte of his teacher’s early musical vision.77 Zandonai would adapt D’Annunzio’s popular Francesca da Rimini; Tito Ricordi (1865–1933), patron of the most prestigious Italian music publisher of the time, had lobbied for this collaboration. Ricordi had been promoting Zandonai as the favorite to replace Puccini as Casa Ricordi’s principal star and wanted to boost the young composer’s career by linking his name to D’Annunzio’s. The collaboration resulted in one of Zandonai’s most popular operas, though it was not without challenges: the libretto was initially too long and its prose was at times too rich to be effectively set to music. But the work was completed in 1913 and was premiered in 1914, garnering major acclaim. D’Annunzio, however, was not present at the premiere and would carefully avoid every performance of the work. He had never grown fond of Zandonai and would not look back on the collaboration with great esteem, seeing Francesca da Rimini as too close in style to the standard melodramas of the day.

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One common denominator marks D’Annunzio’s collaborations with Puccini, Mascagni, and Zandonai: all three composers saw in D’Annunzio— aside from the fame of his name—an opportunity to move away from verismo (which I will discuss in greater detail in Chap. 4). D’Annunzio, for his part, while wanting to use these collaborations to set his artistic vision apart from the banality he saw in contemporary Italian music, also understood them as part of his larger goal of matching and surpassing Wagner. He shared this ambition with Alberto Franchetti (1860–1942), an Italian opera composer who himself sought to blend Italian Grand Opera with German influences.78 Franchetti worked on the score of D’Annunzio’s masterpiece La figlia di Iorio, with the poet overseeing every detail of the adaptation, composing new verses specifically for this version. Franchetti, however, struggled with D’Annunzio’s tendency to subordinate the musical accompaniment to the rich texture of the libretto, and the opera failed to meet the high expectations set by the success of the original tragedy.79 D’Annunzio would nonetheless fare better in his collaborations with some of the protagonists of the so-called Generazione dell’80—in particular Alfredo Casella (1883–1947), Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973), and the already mentioned Pizzetti—a group of composers and musicians, all born in the 1880s, who sought to expand the cultural horizons of Italian music.80 They worked to challenge the conventions of contemporary Italian opera by opening it to broader European influences, while at the same time maintaining a core identity of “Italianness” in these works. Specifically, the “Generazione dell’80” shared D’Annunzio’s hope of reaching back to opera’s Florentine origins.81 In 1913, Malipiero sought to set one of D’Annunzio’s earliest tragedies—Il sogno di un mattino d’autunno—to music. The project was undercut by several flaws, but the collaboration would go beyond musical adaptation: in 1924 D’Annunzio and Malipiero, working with Alfredo Casella, would create the “Corporazione delle nuove musiche” (“New Music Corporation”), a cultural organization for the dissemination of modern music in Italy. Among the “Generazione dell’80,” it was Pizzetti who most closely shared D’Annunzio’s vision, and their collaboration would be an enduring success. A composer, musician, and music critic, Pizzetti had shown a clear predisposition for opera from a young age: as a student, his greatest ambition was to expand and develop the operatic genre.82 In 1905, he entered a competition by scoring the prologue of D’Annunzio’s La nave (1908), a patriotic tragedy celebrating the heroism of the Italian Navy. The result drew critical praise for both poet and composer, and Pizzetti

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would go on to score the entire play.83 Even early on in his career, Pizzetti was confident about his role as an innovator of lyrical theater. This ambition, along with the hostility toward verismo that Pizzetti shared with D’Annunzio, brought the composer and the poet closer together, in a relationship that lasted almost 30 years. As a testament to his admiration, D’Annunzio coined the flattering moniker “Ildebrando di Parma” for the composer. For his part, Pizzetti was seduced by D’Annunzio’s ideas on Italian national music: as a music critic, for example, Pizzetti would be instrumental in drawing attention to the Italian origins of Gregorian chant. Pizzetti’s collaboration with D’Annunzio was prolific and multiform: aside from writing music for the dramas La nave (1908) and La pisanella (1913), he wrote an accompaniment to the poem I pastori (1908), a celebration of D’Annunzio’s Abruzzo, portraying the region as a mythical, bucolic wilderness. The composer even provided a musical theme, “La sinfonia del fuoco,” for the film Cabiria (1914), a colossal work of early Italian cinema written by D’Annunzio and directed by the pioneering Giovanni Castrone (1882–1959). The apex of the D’Annunzio-Pizzetti collaboration, however, was the tragedy Fedra, based on Euripides’ Hippolytus (428 BC). Pizzetti himself proposed the subject of the Phaedra myth to D’Annunzio, and the two worked on Fedra from 1909 to 1912, finally premiering the opera in 1913. As Tedeschi has argued, Pizzetti was in many ways the ideal D’Annunzian musician, a composer whose works embodied precisely the principle that D’Annunzio had expressed in the voice of Stelio Effrena84: music in the service of the poetry of words. The composer’s style exalted D’Annunzio’s language, earning the poet’s sincere admiration,85 and being cited by critics as a concrete step beyond verismo.86

2.7   Musical Epilogue When World War I erupted, D’Annunzio left Paris and was finally able to return to Italy, where he campaigned in favor of Italian military intervention. This political engagement gave his work new drive, helping the poet consolidate his role in the Italian collective consciousness as the “national bard,” or “vate della patria.” Beyond his artistic accomplishments, D’Annunzio actually fought in a number of major engagements: the incursion over Trieste (during which he crashed his plane and lost his right eye), the Bakar mockery, and the flight over Vienna.87 But his most spectacular venture was the 1919 takeover of the city of Fiume. In protest of

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the Paris Peace Conference’s handover of Fiume from the Kingdom of Italy to the future Kingdom of Yugoslavia, D’Annunzio led a volunteer militia into the streets, declaring Italian control over the city. At the official celebration of this takeover, on the evening of August 30, 1920, D’Annunzio presented to a cheering crowd the Free State of Fiume’s new constitution. In the final two paragraphs of this document, D’Annunzio highlighted the civic role that music would play in the future society of Fiume, describing it as both a religious and a social institution.88 The poet wished to bring about a new era, one in which music would testify to Italy’s glorious past while also paving the way for its future. D’Annunzio announced, furthermore, the construction of an auditorium that would allow the citizens of Fiume to gather and attend free musical performances. This plan overtly echoed Bayreuth and the Theater of Orange, to say nothing of the vindication it would bring D’Annunzio for the failure of the Theater of Albano.89 But when D’Annunzio and his troops were finally forced by the Italian government to leave Fiume, his theater plans would again end in failure. The poet would spend the last years of his life exiled in a sprawling residential complex in Northern Italy that he christened “Vittoriale degli Italiani.”90 The complex was built between 1922 and 1938 as a monument to D’Annunzio’s life and his artistic accomplishments. Appropriately, the architect—Giancarlo Maroni (1893–1952)—designed an open-air amphitheater as part of his plans: a classical horseshoe-shaped structure inspired by Greek arenas and Pompeii’s ruins, with a breathtaking view of Lake Garda. Even this, however, D’Annunzio would never see: it was completed only in 1954, 15 years after D’Annunzio’s death. During his lifetime, the poet seemed to find solace only in the Stanza della musica, an indoor performance space at the “Vittoriale” complex, richly decorated with homages to the myth of Orpheus, and cluttered with ancient instruments and portraits of musicians dear to D’Annunzio, including Wagner. In this space, the poet could physically immerse himself in music, holding chamber performances with groups like the Vittoriale Quartet, a string quartet of in-residence musicians.91 Throughout his life, D’Annunzio exalted music as a superior art form, an ideal that informed both his life and his artistic production (poems, novels, and plays). For the poet, musicians and composers were elect souls, priests of a trans-historical cult who were capable of unpacking, with their art, the otherwise impenetrable mysteries of nature. For many years, Wagner embodied the ultimate composer for D’Annunzio, a figure in

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whom art and life were inextricably mixed. As such, Wagner and his theater at Bayreuth were the models for D’Annunzio’s vision of fusing drama with both music and Italy itself. But in the end D’Annunzio’s vision would look past even Wagner, culminating in the ambitious (if misguided) Fiume episode, where he gave voice to his conviction that music had a near-­ religious role in human society. This episode sheds light retrospectively on the seriousness of his efforts to resuscitate Italian opera by channeling Greek tragedy, and it speaks to the earnestness of his collaborations (both successful and unsuccessful) with musicians over the course of his life. As I will show in the following chapters, D’Annunzio’s ideas would fundamentally influence the next generations of Italian intellectuals and poets in their understanding of the intersections between literature and music, in particular opera.

Notes 1. D’Annunzio, ever concise, writes: “Il melodramma è senza dubbio una forma esaurita. Per una legge naturale, avendo prodotto abbastanza, deve cessare di esistere” (Melodrama is undoubtedly an exhausted art form. By natural law, having already produced a certain sufficiency, it must cease to exist). “A proposito della ‘Giuditta,’” La tribuna, March 14, 1887. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Scritti giornalistici 1882–1888, ed. Anna Maria Andreoli (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), 856. 2. D’Annunzio, Scritti giornalistici, 859: “The public asked only for music. It did not care about the words. Every eighteenth-century master had already scored almost all of Pietro Metastasio’s melodramas, often two, three, and many more times. Audiences knew the librettos by heart, so they devoted their attention to the music. The music was new, full of unexpected moments . . . The libretto had no importance at all; the music was everything. And the music of operas was written specifically for the singers.” Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 3. Valentina Valentini, La tragedia moderna e contemporanea: Sul teatro di Gabriele D’Annunzio (Milan: Francoangeli, 1992), 24. 4. Eugenio Montale, Sulla poesia (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), 68: “D’Annunzio, in the recent Italian tradition, is a bit like Hugo in the French lineage, from Baudelaire onward: he is present in everything because he has experimented or had contact with all the stylistic and prosodic possibilities of our time. In this sense, to learn nothing from him would be a very bad sign.” 5. Scholarship on D’Annunzio and music has always been a fertile, albeit enclosed, endeavor. Among the more recent general studies, see Silvana

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Cellucci Marcone, D’Annunzio e la musica (L’Aquila: Japadre Editore, 1972), an attempt at reconstructing the poet’s approach to music by examining his relationships and correspondences with musicians throughout his life; Rubens Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1988), which focuses on the music-based thematic threads that are found throughout D’Annunzio’s works; and Guarnieri Corazzol, Sensualità senza carne, one of the most complete modern analyses of the poet’s relationship of with music: see pp. 173–98 for an extensive list of major and minor contributions to the bibliography of this subject. 6. Niva Lorenzini, D’annunzio (Palermo: Palumbo, 1993), 17. 7. “Gabriele D’Annunzio, Cento e cento pagine del Libro Segreto di Gabriele D’Annunzio tentato di morire, ed. Pietro Gibellini (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 28–30: “The thunder of the organ rattled my head, as sudden as the burst of a storm, and the atrium trembled as though the cloud of pain gained strength from the shaking itself . . . I heard my own inner voice like the melody of a conversation with that music. I had become a musical instrument in the hands of an invisible musician . . . it was as if Palestrina himself had extracted the mortal anguish from my body and purified its stormy breath with Nicolò dell’Arca’s work and made of it a tragic harmony . . . In that moment I was born to music, underwent my nativity in infinite music, received in that music my rebirth and my fate. In a communion of tears my second life had begun. Another life was beginning, through the concordant discord of the same virtues, more alive and truer than my second and first.” 8. Pierluigi Palestrina (1525–1594)—a sixteenth-century composer of masses and motets, as well as a prolific and successful madrigalist—successfully assimilated the richly developed polyphonic techniques of his French and Flemish predecessors. He was able to reconcile the technical, intellectual, and aesthetic directives of Catholic Church music in the post-Tridentine era. Through his achievement, he gained a reputation as the preeminent Catholic composer of his time. See Lewis Lockwood, Noel O’Regan, and Jessie Ann Owens, “Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da,” Oxford Music Online, 2001, Oxford University Press, accessed February 11, 2018, h t t p : / / w w w. o x f o r d m u s i c o n l i n e . c o m / v i e w / 1 0 . 1 0 9 3 / gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000020749 9. Guarnieri Corazzol, Sensualità senza carne, 45. 10. For an exhaustive analysis of D’Annunzio’s relationship with European Symbolism, see the collection of essays edited by Emilio Mariano, D’Annunzio e il simbolismo europeo (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1976). 11. Francesco Flora, although noting D’Annunzio’s use of musical motifs to symbolize characters, themes, and situations, ultimately argues that we should delve no further into this aspect of D’Annunzio’s work, believing

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that music was not integral to the author’s intellectual direction: see Flora, D’Annunzio (Messina-Milan: Principato, 1935), 181–185. Alfredo Gargiulo reflected on the musicality of Poema paradisiaco, but also denied the centrality of music in D’Annunzio’s poetry; see Gargiulo, Gabriele D’Annunzio (Firenze: Sansoni, 1941), 182. Luciano Anceschi subsequently remarked on the light musicality of D’Annunzio’s Versi di amore e di Gloria: LXIV, but described this musicality as a mere means of relief from the otherwise dark tone of the poem. Guarnieri Corazzol, likewise, described the Poema paradisiaco as only incidentally musical rather than the product of a programmatic musical sensibility; see Sensualità senza carne, 112–113. Marco Della Sciucca finally challenged this low estimation of D’Annunzio’s musicality, examining the musical research that went into the composition of Poema paradisiaco; see “Analizzando la musicalità della poesia: Il ‘Poema paradisiaco’ di Gabriele D’Annunzio,” Nuova Rivista Musicale italiana 34, no. 1 (2000): 43–64. 12. Della Sciucca, “Analizzando la musicalità della poesia,” 46. 13. Raffaele Mellace, “Letteratura e musica,” Storia della letteratura italiana—Il Novecento: Scenari di fine secolo 1 (Milan: Garzanti, 2001), 440. 14. “Nel primo centenario della nascita di Vincenzo Bellini” and “In morte di Giuseppe Verdi.” In Chap. 3 I will discuss the latter’s influence on the poetry of Saba. 15. Alberto Bertoni, “‘Alcyone’ come partitura: qualche cenno metrico,” Lingua e stile 12, no. 2 (1987): 281–294. 16. Mellace, “Letteratura e musica,” 439–40. 17. Guarnieri Corazzol, Sensualità senza carne, 59–60. In L’innocente, other concepts recur as themes, distinguishable from these “motifs” (i.e. part of a conventional narrative framework influenced by European Symbolism). Only later does D’Annunzio combine the two, introducing integral thematic patterns that anticipate the leitmotifs of Wagner’s operas. 18. D’Annunzio’s writings on music are collected in the two volumes of his Scritti giornalistici, ed. Annamaria Andreoli (Milan: Mondadori, 2003). A selection of these writings appears also in Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica, 137–220. 19. Guarnieri Corazzol, Sensualità senza carne, 40. 20. Guarnieri Corazzol describes D’Annunzio’s musical education as ample, but his attitude crass and ambivalent, torn between spiritualism and erudition. For the critic, this equates to a fundamentally amateurish and flawed approach to music. Sensualità senza carne, 55. 21. Lara Sonja Uras explores D’Annunzio’s correspondences with Italian musicians in “D’Annunzio e i musicisti italiani: scambi epistolari,” in D’Annunzio musico immaginifico: atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Siena 14–16 luglio 2005 (Florence: Olschki, 2008), 69–95.

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22. Francesco Paolo Tosti (1846–1916) was an Italian songwriter and music teacher. He studied violin and composition at the Conservatory of Naples. In his youth, he composed some of his most popular successes, including the songs Non m’ama più and Lamento d’amore. Tosti later moved to Rome, when the Princess Margherita of Savoy chose him as her singing teacher. He was also appointed curator of the court music archives. Tosti then moved to London, where he was appointed vocal teacher to the royal family. After being knighted in 1908, he retired in 1912 to Italy, where he remained until his death. See Horner, Keith, “Tosti, Sir (Francesco) Paolo,” Oxford Music Online, 2001, Oxford University Press, accessed March 18, 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/view/10.1093/ gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000028203 23. Gabriele D’Annunzio, “Un poeta melico,” La tribuna, June 28, 1886. 24. Guarnieri Corazzol, Sensualità senza carne, 111. 25. Regarding Wagner’s impact on Italian culture, see Giorgio Gualerzi, Wagner in Italia (1871–1971) (Venice: E.A.  Teatro La Fenice, 1972); Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, Tristano, mio Tristano: Gli scrittori italiani e il caso Wagner (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988). 26. D’Annunzio signed the December 29 review with the pseudonym Vere De Vere (Gabriele D’Annunzio, “Intermezzo,” Scritti giornalistici, 221–224). He saw the opera on April 16th, directed by Vittorio Podesti at the Teatro Brunetti in Bologna. Lohengrin had premiered at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna on November 1, 1871, under the direction of Angelo Mariani. See Gualerzi, Wagner in Italia. 27. In the aforementioned “A proposito della ‘Giuditta,’” D’Annunzio writes: “Preferirei piuttosto un ritorno all’antico che questa pazza ed illogica innovazione per cui Riccardo Wagner ha INVANO profusi con abbondanza veramente mirabile, tanti tesori di inspirazione e di scienza” (I would much prefer a return to the ancient over this crazy and illogical innovation for which Richard Wagner has IN VAIN produced, in truly remarkable abundance, so many treasures of inspiration and wisdom). Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica, 170–171. 28. June 2, 1888, conducted by Giuseppe Martucci and under the stage direction of Gaetano Archinti’s. See Gualerzi, Wagner in Italia. 29. Guarnieri Corazzol, Sensualità senza carne, 17. 30. D’Annunzio, Il caso Wagner, ed. Paola Sorge (Bari: Laterza, 1996), 24–26. Umberto Saba evokes D’Annunzio’s passion for Wagner in his short story “Il bianco immacolato signore,” which I will discuss in Chap. 3. 31. “Io non sosterrò che i maestri moderni debbano avere tanta cultura letteraria da poter comporre senza l’aiuto d’un poeta il libretto, e non pretenderò che, come Riccardo Wagner e come Arrigo Boito, essi, facendo ricerche pazienti di ritmi nuovi e di rime rare, producano una duplice opera

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d’arte” (I will not argue that modern masters must have enough of a literary background to write out a libretto without the help of a poet, and I will not pretend that, like Richard Wagner and Arrigo Boito, they must painstakingly seek out new rhythms and rare rhymes, thus producing a double work of art). Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica, 166. 32. Guarnieri Corazzol, Sensualità senza carne, 152. 33. Arnold Whittall, “Leitmotif” Oxford Music Online, 2001, Oxford University Press, accessed March 18, 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/ omo-9781561592630-e-0000016360 34. See Guarnieri Corazzol, Tristano, mio Tristano, 15–16. Guarnieri Corazzol also reconstructs the French filter through which D’Annunzio read Wagner’s librettos in Sensualità senza carne, 149–60. For an earlier study of D’Annunzio’s relationship with Wagner, see Giuliano Donati-­Petténi, D’Annunzio e Wagner (Florence: Le Monnier, 1923). 35. “Ciascuno di quei musici maghi ch’essi prediligevano tesseva intorno alla lor sensibilità acuita un diverso incantesimo. Una Pagina di Roberto Schumann evocava il fantasma d’un amore inveterato . . . Un Improvviso di Federico Chopin . . . Altri cortinaggi di porpora, cupi come la passione senza scampo, intorno a un letto profondo come un sepolcro evocava l’Erotica di Edoardo Grieg” (Each of those musicians whom they loved weaved a different charm about their supersensitive feelings. A page of Robert Schumann evoked the phantom of a very old amour that extended over him . . . An Impromptu of Frederic Chopin . . . High purple curtains, dark as a merciless passion, around a bed deep as a sepulcher—that is what is evoked by the Erotic of Edward Grieg). D’Annunzio, Il trionfo della morte, 337. Trans. A. Hornblow, 362–63. 36. D’Annunzio, Il trionfo della morte, 337–38: “But, in the prelude to Tristan and Ysolde (sic), the leap of love toward death was unchained with inconceivable violence; the insatiable desire was exalted even to the intoxication of destruction. ‘... To drink yonder the cup of eternal love in thy honor, I would, on the same altar, consecrate thee to death with myself.’” Trans. A. Hornblow, 363. 37. In a letter to Francesco Paolo Tosti, D’Annunzio asks, “Hai veduto nel Trionfo della morte la parafrasi letteraria del Tristano e Isotta? Come t’è parsa?” (Did you see the literary paraphrase of Tristan and Isolde in The Triumph of Death? What did you think?). Cellucci Marcone, D’Annunzio e la musica, 33–34. 38. For an exhaustive analysis of the musical references in Il trionfo della morte, see Nicola Cattò, “Appunti musicali per il Trionfo della Morte,” Quaderni del Vittoriale, nuova serie 2 (2006): 47–92.

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39. The term Gesamtkunstwerk has become part of the standard language of art scholarship and aesthetics, referring to an artist’s combination of several different forms of art in one work. Aside from music, the term is used frequently in architecture. Wagner first used the term in the essay “Art and Revolution” (1849), and soon after, with minor variations, in “The Artwork of the Future” (“Das Kunstwerk des Zukunft,” 1849). Inspiration for the concept came from the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, models that Wagner sought to evoke with his own dramas. The composer honed the concept further in his theoretical masterpiece Opera and Drama (Opera und Drama, 1851), where he says that the three components of opera—Wort (Word), Ton (Music), and Drama (Scene)—should be fused seamlessly into a single form (a total work of art). 40. D’Annunzio, Il trionfo della morte, 3: “We had several times discussed an ideal modern book in prose that, varied in sound and rhythm as a poem, would combine in its style the most diverse varieties of the written word and harmonize all the varieties of the mystery. This book would alternate the precision of science, with the seduction of dreams; it would not seek just to imitate, but to continue Nature. Free from the constraints of fairy tales, it would bring to the light of literary art, the particular life—sensual, sentimental, and intellectual—of a human being placed in the center of the universe.” D’Annunzio discusses the same idea in an interview with Ugo Ojetti, included in the volume Alla scoperta dei letterati (Milan: Bocca, 1899), 297–331. 41. D’Annunzio quotes the original German: “Es gibt Bücher, welche für Seele und Gesundheit einen umgekehrten Wert haben, je nachdem die niedere Seele, die niedrigere Lebenskraft oder aber die höhere und gewaltigere sich ihrer bedienen: im ersten Falle sind es gefährliche, abbröckelnde, auflösende Bücher, im andern Heroldsrufe, welche die Tapfersten zu ihrer Tapferkeit herausfordern.” Jenseits von Gut und Bose, Aph. XXX. Trans. from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norma (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 30. 42. Published on July 23, August 3, and August 9, 1893. They can be found in Scritti giornalistici, 233–251. See also Paola Sorge, Il caso Wagner, 47–78. 43. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Michael Tanner, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2003), 14. 44. “[Wagner] flatters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and togs it out in music; he flatters every form of Christianity, every religious expression of decadence.” Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 40.

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45. “‘Parsifal’ is a work of rancour, of revenge, of the most secret concoction of poisons with which to make an end of the first conditions of life, it is a bad work. The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to unnaturalness: I despise anybody who does not regard ‘Parsifal’ as an outrage upon morality.” Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 73. 46. D’Annunzio, Il caso Wagner, 76: “Only music today is able to express those dreams that are born in the depths of the modern melancholy, the indefinite thoughts, the limitless desires, the sourceless anxieties, the inconsolable desperations, all the darkest and most anguished torments . . . Richard Wagner has not only gathered in his work all the spirituality and ideality that circled around him, but by interpreting our metaphysical needs, he has shown us the most hidden part of our lives.” 47. Casella, D’Annunzio e la musica, 22. 48. Romain Rolland, Les origines du théâtre lyrique moderne: l’histoire de l’opéra en Europe avant Lully et Scarlatti (PhD diss., University of Paris, Sorbonne, 1895). 49. “Il 9 maggio, a Roma, d’A. incontra R. Rolland: gli dichiara tra l’altro di provare un incipiente fastidio per la musica di Wagner” (On May 9th, in Rome, D’A. meets R. Rolland: and confesses, among other things, to feel an incipient annoyance for Wagner’s music). Guarnieri Corazzol, Sensualità senza carne, 19. 50. D’Annunzio, “La rinascenza della tragedia,” La tribuna, August 3, 1897, in Scritti giornalistici, 262–265. 51. Cesare Pascarella Jr., “Il sogno del ‘Teatro di Albano,’” D’Annunzio romano (Rome: Palombi, 1963), 149–70. For reports on D’Annunzio’s plans for the theater in Albano, see also Mario Morasso, “Il Futuro teatro d’Albano: Colloquio con G.  D’Annunzio,” L’Illustrazione italiana, October 20, 1897; and Angelo Orvieto, “Il teatro di Festa: Colloquio con Gabriele D’Annunzio,” Il Marzocco, December 12, 1897. 52. Pascarella, “Il sogno del teatro di Albano,” 157. 53. See D’Annunzio, Il caso Wagner, 32. 54. Il fuoco, 158: “The work of Richard Wagner . . . is founded in the German spirit, and its essence is purely northern. His reform is not without analogy with that attempted by Luther; his drama is the supreme flower of the genius of a race, the extraordinarily powerful summary of the aspirations that have stirred the souls of the symphonists and national poets, from Bach to Beethoven, from Wieland to Goethe. If you imagined his work on the Mediterranean shores, amid our pale olive-trees, our slender laurels, under the glorious light of the Latin sky, you would see it grow pale and dissolve.” Trans. Dora Knowlton Ranous, The Flame (New York: The National Alumni, 1906), 102, with my modifications.

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55. D’Annunzio is thus engaging with Nietzsche when he critiques him. Another example of this is D’Annunzio’s claim that Nietzsche had neglected the value of the Florentine Camerata, derided Palestrina, and mocked the recitativo of early Italian operas (referring to The Case of Wagner, 21–22). D’Annunzio puts his objections to Nietzsche in the voice of his novel’s protagonist: “Filo ineguale e confuso . . . Nulla è più lontano dall’Orestiade quanto la tetralogia dell’Anello. Penetrarono assai più profondamente l’essenza della tragedia greca i Fiorentini di Casa Bardi . . . Essi cercavano nell’antichità greca lo spirito di vita: essi tentavano di sviluppare armoniosamente tutte le energie umane, di manifestare con tutti i mezzi dell’arte l’uomo integro” (It was an uneven and a tangled thread . . . Nothing is further from the Orestiades than the tetralogy of the Ring. The Florentines of the Casa Bardi have penetrated much deeper into the true meaning of Greek Tragedy . . .They sought the spirit of life in Grecian antiquity; they tried to develop harmoniously all human energies, to manifest man in his integrity by every method of art). Il fuoco, 159–60. Trans. Ranous, 103. This again speaks to the emphasis on Italy’s authentic access to the Mediterranean spirit. But here too there are echoes of Nietzsche in The Case of Wagner (1888), where the philosopher praises Bizet over Wagner, juxtaposing Wagner’s histrionic operas to the human passion of Bizet’s Carmen: “I heard yesterday—will you believe it?—the masterpiece of Bizet for the twentieth time . . . May I venture to say that Bizet’s orchestra music is almost the sole orchestration I yet endure? That other orchestra music is all the rage at present, the Wagnerian orchestration, at once brutal, artificial, and ‘innocent’—thereby speaking to the three senses of modern soul at the same time,—how detrimental to me is that Wagnerian orchestration!” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner; The Twilight of the Idols; Nietzsche Contra Wagner, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 5. 56. Il fuoco, 280–81: “Oh, no! I shall not revive any ancient form; I intend to create a new form, obeying only my instinct and the genius of my own race, as did the Greeks when they created that marvelous structure of beauty, forever inimitable—the Greek drama. For a very long time, the three practicable arts of music, poetry and dancing have been separated . . . and I think that now it is impossible to combine them in a single rhythmical structure without taking from one or another its own dominant character, which has already been acquired . . . Among the things most susceptible of rhythm, Language is the foundation of every art that aspires to perfection. Do you think that the language is given its full value in the Wagnerian drama?” Trans. Ranous, 185–186. 57. Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Nietzsche e la Poetica del Fuoco,” in D’Annunzio a Yale: Atti del convegno, Yale University, 26–29 marzo 1988: 295–303, ed. Paolo Valesio (Gardone Riviera: Fondazione del Vittoriale degli Italiani,

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1989). Mazzotta goes on to argue that the cyclical alternation of day and night represents Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Return. 58. Il fuoco, 157–58: “‘Bayreuth!’ Interrupted Prince Hoditz. ‘No; the Janiculum!’ exclaimed Stelio, suddenly breaking his silence of blissful dizziness. ‘A Roman hill. We do not need the wood and brick of Upper Franconia; we will have a marble theater on a Roman hill’” Trans. Ranous, 101. 59. Il Fuoco can indeed in many ways be read as a theoretical summa of D’Annunzio’s ideas on dramaturgy. 60. This work was followed quickly by Sogno d’un mattino di primavera (1897) and Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno (1898). 61. Valentini analyzes the references to La città morta in Il fuoco. 62. As Lucia Re notes, D’Annunzio’s plays were always centered on a great tragic actress. Re, “Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Theater of Memory,” 16 63. Valentini, La tragedia moderna e contemporanea, 62. 64. See Mary Ann Frese Witt for a synthesis of the fundamental sources of D’Annunzio’s drama, in particular the role of Nietzsche in articulating an idea of modern tragedy: “He read The Birth of Tragedy with a view toward the creation of his own modern tragedies and toward a vision of a new kind of theater. There were other influences as well. While he admired Wagner, he was attracted by the ‘Mediterranean,’ anti-Germanic side of Nietzsche, by Romain Rolland’s concept of a theater of the people, and by current French idea on creating a ‘Latin’ theater in opposition to Wagner through the revival of tragedy in outdoor productions in the Roman theater at Orange. He was undoubtedly aware of Paul Claudel’s activity in the rebirth of ‘religious’ theater and certainly felt himself to be part of the general European movement against bourgeois realism.” Witt, The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 37. 65. Valentini, La tragedia moderna e contemporanea, 16. 66. Witt best summarizes D’Annunzio’s ambitions: “In the plays he calls his tragedies, D’Annunzio continues to write the tragedy of modernity’s inability to realize fully the rebirth of tragedy.” Mary Ann Frese Witt, Nietzsche and the Rebirth of the Tragic (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 82. 67. Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Gabriele D’Annunzio (Milan: Mondadori, 1909), 107. 68. One of several political rallies, the speech was pronounced in Pescara on August 22, 1897, and published the following day in the pages of “La tribuna” with the title “Laude dell’illaudato.” Now in D’Annunzio, Prose di Ricerca ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Giorgio Zanetti (Milan: Mondadori, 2005), vol. I, 429–440. 69. Lorenzini, D’annunzio, 63–63.

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70. Il fuoco, 302: “‘The gesture of Perseus!’ exclaimed Daniele, still under the spell of exaltation. ‘At the end of the tragedy you cut off the head of the Moira, and show it to the multitude, ever young and ever new, which shall bring the spectacle to a close amid great cries of enthusiasm.’” Trans. Ranous, 197. 71. Valentini, La tragedia moderna e contemporanea, 25. 72. Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica, 45. 73. The first project that D’Annunzio and Puccini discussed was an adaptation of Parisina, eventually set to music by Mascagni in 1913. Another project was Rosa di Cipro, the first draft of what would become La Pisanelle, ou la mort parfumée, scored by Ildebrando Pizzetti (also in 1913). The project that the poet and the composer discussed for the triptych was entitled La crociata degli innocenti and represented Puccini’s attempt to chart a new direction after the critical failure of La fanciulla del west. According to Tedeschi, this subject would prove unsatisfactory to both D’Annunzio and Puccini, leaving both of them embittered by the experience. D’Annunzio e la musica, 51–53. 74. Giovanni Gelati chronicles the surprising yet prolific relationship between D’Annunzio and Mascagni in Il vate e il capobanda: D’Annunzio e Mascagni (Livorno: Belforte, 1992). 75. Gabriele D’Annunzio, “Il capobanda,” Il mattino, September 2–3, 1892. D’Annunzio first depicted Mascagni as an avid businessman, more interested in profit than in artistic creation. He writes: “L’autore della Cavalleria rusticana, dell’Amico Fritz, dei Rantzau, e di non so quante altre opere ed operette inedite, non si occupa che di affari, non può occuparsi che di affari. Egli è sempre stato fuori dell’arte, e ci vorrà rimanere” (The author of Cavalleria rusticana, of L’amico Fritz, of I Rantzau, and I don’t know how many other unpublished works and operas, cares only about business, cannot help but care only about business. He has always been outside of the artistic world, and he will want to stay that way). Scritti giornalistici, 79. 76. However, the colossal scope of this opera would necessitate cuts that ruined the artistic integrity of the work, in D’Annunzio’s eyes, to the extent that it was eventually scrapped altogether. 77. For a complete analysis of this collaboration see Renato Chiesa, “La Francesca da Rimini di D’Annunzio nella musica di Riccardo Zandonai,” Quaderni Dannunziani 32–33 (1965): 320–354. 78. Jürgen Maehder, “Franchetti, Baron Alberto (opera),” Oxford Music Online, 2002, Oxford University Press, accessed January 11, 2018, h t t p : / / w w w. o x f o r d m u s i c o n l i n e . c o m / v i e w / 1 0 . 1 0 9 3 / gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-5000901678 79. Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica, 43–44. For a more detailed account of the origins of the libretto see Raffaella Bertazzoli, “Storia intertestuale di

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un libretto d’opera: La figlia di Iorio,” in Gabriele D’Annunzio e la musica nel centocinquantesimo anniversario della nascita 1863–2013, ed. Giuseppe Ferrari (Verona: Cierre edizioni, 2015), 9–26. 80. Other members of this group were Franco Alfano (1875–1954) and Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936). These musicians sought to overcome the conventions of Italian opera, trying to update it in light of Wagner’s innovations. As Massimo Mila explains, the group simply took note of the changing conditions of culture, and the changing taste and habits of the Italian audience: it was simply no longer possible to write successful operas in the style of Verdi, Puccini, or Donizetti. Mila, Breve storia della musica, 491. 81. Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica, 108–09. D’Annunzio’s relationship with musicians in his later career is the ultimate testament to the poet’s commitment to music, and to his efforts to continually develop his work. These collaborations produced mixed results, were met with mixed critical and popular responses, and resulted in widely varying degrees of good will between D’Annunzio and the respective composers. See also Valentini’s assessment of these collaborations and their goal of artistic innovation. 82. Guido M. Gatti and John C.G. Waterhouse, “Pizzetti, Ildebrando,” Oxford Music Online, 2001, Oxford University Press, accessed March 18, 2018, h t t p : / / w w w. o x f o r d m u s i c o n l i n e . c o m / v i e w / 1 0 . 1 0 9 3 / g m o / 9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000021881 83. Pizzetti was also a respected music critic. In an open letter to Giuseppe Bocca, published in Rivista musicale italiana, Pizzetti provided an important account of the principles that inspired his work on the score of D’Annunzio’s La nave. Ildebrando Pizzetti, “La musica per ‘La Nave’ di Gabriele D’Annunzio: Lettera all’avv. Giuseppe Bocca,” Rivista musicale italiana XIV (1907): 855–862. Also in Alfredo Casella, ed., Gabriele D’Annunzio e la musica (Milan: Fratelli Bocca, 1939), 107–114. 84. Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica, 59. 85. As Tedeschi puts it, “D’Annunzio è sincero nell’ammirazione di quello che sinora ha cercato invano: una musica che mantenga intatto il predominio della parola, la sua” (D’Annunzio is sincere in the admiration of what he has been thus far looking for in vain: a music that would keep the predominance of the word intact, in particular, his word). Tedeschi, D’Annunzio e la musica, 84. 86. Vincenzo Borghetti and Riccardo Pecci edited a collection of essays that explore several aspects of the collaboration between D’Annunzio and Pizzetti, with particular emphasis on their work on Fedra. The volume offers an important account of the opera’s critical success, an assessment of its artistic contours, and an identification of its main cultural sources of inspiration. Most importantly, these essays help us better understand the artistic trajectory of the D’Annunzio-Pizzetti collaboration, the two art-

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ists’ aim to overcome both the provincialism of contemporary Italian opera and Wagnerism, to create a new drama that would redefine the cultural coordinates of Italian opera. Borghetti and Pecci, Il bacio della sfinge: D’Annunzio Borghetti e “Fedra” (Turin: EDT, 1998). 87. In 1916, D’Annunzio copiloted a biplane (commanded by lieutenant Luigi Bologna) in a bombing raid over Trieste. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing near Grado, permanently damaging D’Annunzio’s eyesight and necessitating a long period of convalescence. This was not, however, the end of D’Annunzio’s role in World War I. On the night of February 10, 1918, D’Annunzio participated in a naval raid in which a group of fast attack torpedo boats assaulted the Austrian battleships anchored in the Bay of Bakar, near Fiume. The battle was not consequential for the war, but was effective in boosting the morale of Italian troops, still devastated after their defeat in the Battle of Caporetto (October 24–November 19, 1917). The attack would be remembered as the Beffa di Buccari (Bakar Mockery). Finally, on August 9, 1918, D’Annunzio led a group of planes over Vienna, releasing thousands of leaflets urging the Austrian population to surrender. 88. The document, originally entitled “La reggenza del Carnaro: Disegno di un nuovo ordinamento dello stato libero di Fiume” (The Carnaro Regency: Design of a New Order of the Free State of Fiume), was co-authored by the Italian syndicalist Alceste De Ambris (1874–1934). In paragraph 64, D’Annunzio declares: “Nella reggenza italiana del Carnaro la Musica è una istituzione religiosa e sociale . . . la Musica considerata come linguaggio rituale è l’esaltatrice dell’atto di vita, dell’opera di vita” (In the Italian regency of Carnaro, Music is a religious and social institution . . . Music, considered as a ritual language, is the exalter of the act of life, of life as a work of art). Prose di ricerca 1, 127–28. 89. In paragraph 65, D’Annunzio outlines his project for a theatre, not surprisingly echoing Wagner’s Bayreuth: “Nella città di Fiume al collegio degli Edili è commessa l’edificazione di una Rotonda capace di almeno diecimila uditori, fornita di gradinate comode per il popolo e una d’una vasta fossa per l’orchestra e per il coro” (In the city of Fiume, the Builders Guild will commit to the construction of a Theater capable of accommodating at least ten thousand listeners, with comfortable steps for the people and one of a large pit for the orchestra and choir”). Prose di ricerca 1, 128. 90. D’Annunzio is often described as a “prisoner” here, an exile in his own country. Despite his aversion to Mussolini, D’Annunzio was kept alive in isolation in the Vittoriale by the Fascists, who were wary of D’Annunzio’s popularity. As Witt summarizes, “the fascists preferred to keep D’Annunzio more or less imprisoned in his ‘Vittoriale,’ where they could make use of him when convenient without having too much to do with him.” Witt, The Search for Modern Tragedy, 33.

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91. Lucia Re best summarizes D’Annunzio’s project in “Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Theater of Memory: Il Vittoriale degli italiani/Il teatro della memoria di Gabriele D’Annunzio: Il Vittoriale,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 3 (Winter 1987): 6–51. For studies on the structure’s history and architecture, see Umberto Di Cristina, La dimora di D’Annunzio: Il Vittoriale (Palermo: Novecento, 1980); Arturo Mozza, ed., D’Annunzio e il Vittoriale: Guida alla casa del poeta (Gardone Riviera: Edizioni del Vittoriale, 1985); Attilio Mazza, Vittoriale: Casa del sogno di Gabriele D’Annunzio (Brescia: Edizioni del Puntografico, 1988).

References Primary Sources D’Annunzio, Gabriele. 1896. The triumph of death. Trans. Arthur Hornblow. New York: George H. Richmond & Co. ———. 1906. The flame. Trans. Dora Knowlton Ranous. The National Alumni. ———. 1907. Il fuoco. Milan: Fratelli Treves Editori. ———. 1942. Le novelle della Pescara. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1964. Prose di romanzi. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1982. Versi d’amore e di gloria, ed. Luciano Anceschi, Annamaria Andreoli, and Niva Lorenzini. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1995a. Alcyone, ed. Elisa Maria Bertinotti. Milan: Mursia. ———. 1995b. Cento e cento pagine del Libro Segreto di Gabriele D’Annunzio tentato di morire, ed. Pietro Gibellini. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1995c. Poema paradisiaco, ed. Annamaria Andreoli. Milan: Mondador. ———. 1996a. Il caso Wagner, ed. Paola Sorge. Bari: Editori Laterza. ———. 1996b. Scritti giornalistici (1881–1888), ed. Annamaria Andreoli. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1998. Il trionfo della morte. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2003. Scritti giornalistici (1889–1938), ed. Annamaria Andreoli. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2005. Prose di ricerca,  ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Giorgio Zanetti. Milan: Mondadori. Friedrich Nietzsche. 1896. The Case of Wagner; The Twilight of the Idols; Nietzsche Contra Wagner. Trans. Thomas Common. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1979. Scritti su Wagner: Richard Wagner a Bayreuth; Il caso Wagner; Nietzsche contra Wagner, ed. Mario Bortolotto. Milan: Adelphi. ———. 1993. The Birth of Tragedy. London: Penguin. ———. 2001. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. Rolf-­ Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Secondary Sources Bertoni, Alberto. 1987. «Alcyone» come partitura: qualche cenno metrico. Lingua e stile XII. 2: 281–294. Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio. 1909. Gabriele D’Annunzio. Milan: Mondadori. Borghetti, Vincenzo, and Riccardo Pecci. 1998. Il bacio della sfinge. D’Annunzio, Pizzetti e “Fedra.” Turin: EDT. Casella, Alfredo. 1939. Gabriele D’Annunzio e la musica. Milan: Fratelli Bocca. Cellucci Marcone, Silvana. 1972. D’Annunzio e la musica. L’Aquila: Japadre Editore. ———. 1978. Riccardo Wagner nell’opera di D’Annunzio. Quaderni del Vittoriale 9: 17–62. Chiesa, Renato. 1965. La Francesca da Rimini di D’Annunzio nella musica di Riccardo Zandonai. Quaderni Dannunziani 32–33: 320–354. Della Sciucca, Marco. 2000. Indagando la musicalità della poesia. Il ‘Poema paradisiaco’ di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Nuova rivista musicale italiana. 34 (1): 43–64. Di Cristina, Umberto. 1980. La dimora di D’Annunzio: Il Vittoriale. Palermo: Novecento. Donati-Petténi, Giuliano. 1923. D’Annunzio e Wagner. Florence: Le Monnier. Ferrari, Giuseppe, ed. 2015. Gabriele D’Annunzio e la musica: nel centocinquantesimo anniversario della nascita 1863–2013. Verona: Cierre edizioni. Flora, Francesco. 1935. D’Annunzio. Messina-Milan: Principato. Gargiulo, Alfredo. 1941. Gabriele D’Annunzio. Florence: Sansoni. Gelati, Giovanni. 1992. Il vate e il capobanda: D’Annunzio e Mascagni. Livorno: Belforte. Gualerzi, Giorgio. 1972. Wagner in Italia (1871–1971). Venice: E.A.  Teatro La Fenice. Guarnieri Corazzol, Adriana, Fiamma Nicolodi, and Cesare Orselli, eds. 2008. D’Annunzio musico immaginifico: atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Siena 14–16 luglio 2005. Florence: Olschki. Guarnieri Corazzol, Adriana. 1990. Sensualità senza carne: La musica nella vita e nell’opera di D’Annunzio. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———. 1988. Tristano, mio Tristano. Gli scrittori italiani e il caso Wagner. Bologna: il Mulino. Lorenzini, Niva. 1993. D’Annunzio. Palermo: Palumbo. Mariano, Emilio, ed. 1976. D’Annunzio e il simbolismo europeo: Atti del convegno di studio, Gardone Riviera, 14–15-16 settembre 1973. Milan: il Saggiatore. Mazza, Attilio. 1988. Vittoriale: Casa del sogno di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Brescia: Edizioni del Puntografico. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. 1989. Nietzsche e la poetica del Fuoco. D’Annunzio a Yale: Atti del convegno (Yale University, 26–29 marzo 1988). ed. Paolo Valesio. Gardone Riviera: Fondazione del Vittoriale degli Italiani, 295–303. Proceedings.

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Mellace, Raffaele. 2001. Letteratura e musica. Storia della letteratura italiana. Il Novecento. Scenari di fine secolo 1. 431–496. Milan: Garzanti. Mila, Massimo. 1963. Breve storia della musica. Turin: Einaudi. Montale, Eugenio. 1976. Sulla poesia. Milan: Mondadori. Mozza, Arturo, ed. 1985. D’Annunzio e il Vittoriale: Guida alla casa del poeta. Gardone Riviera: Edizioni del Vittoriale. Ojetti, Ugo. 1895. Alla scoperta dei letterati. Milan: Treves. Pascarella, Cesare Jr. 1963. Il sogno del «Teatro di Albano». In D’Annunzio romano, 149–170. Rome: Palombi. Pizzetti, Ildebrando. 1907. La musica per «La Nave» di Gabriele D’Annunzio: Lettera all’avv. Giuseppe Bocca. Rivista musicale italiana XIV: 855–862. Re, Lucia. 2013. Più che l’amore: D’Annunzio’s Bitter Passion and Mediterranean Tragedy. In Discourse Boundary Creation, ed. Peter Carravetta, 131–147. New York: Bordighera Press. ———. 1987. Theater of Memory: Il Vittoriale degli italiani. The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 3: 6–51. Rolland, Romain. 1895. Les origines du théâtre lyrique moderne: l’histoire de l’opéra en Europe avant Lully et Scarlatti. Dissertation, University of Paris, Sorbonne. Tedeschi, Rubens. 1988. D’Annunzio e la musica. Florence: Scandicci. Valentini, Valentina. 1992. La tragedia moderna e mediterranea. Sul teatro di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Milan: Francoangeli. Witt, Mary Ann Frese. 2001. The Search for Modern Tragedy. Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Umberto Saba and the Verdian Sound of Italy

3.1   Civic Library In a short essay addressed to his daughter—“Della biblioteca civica, ovvero della gloria” (“Of the Civic Library, or Of Glory,” 1957)—Umberto Saba recalls the poets he most loved in his youth. He describes the dusty rooms of the public library where he first read the works that would become the foundation of his literary formation: the songs of Leopardi, the lyrical poems of Parini, and the writing of Foscolo, Petrarch, and Manzoni. Saba includes the Italian translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, as well as D’Annunzio’s Poema paradisiaco and, lastly, the work of Carducci. These names represent for Saba the “filo d’oro della tradizione italiana,” the golden thread of the Italian literary tradition, at the end of which he hoped to place his own work.1 Throughout his career, Saba was preoccupied with asserting his place in this pantheon. This ambitious concern stems in part from his biographical circumstances: he was born in Trieste at the end of the nineteenth century, when the city was still a peripheral territory of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like other triestini writers, such as Italo Svevo (1861–1928) and Scipio Slataper (1888–1915), Saba wrote in Italian—he wanted to be identified as part of the Italian literary tradition, as decades later would be demonstrated by the list of Italian masters he claimed as his forerunners.2 But in his list Saba omits one key figure, a man whom he saw as a symbol of Italy itself and whose presence can be felt in most of the poet’s finest writings: composer Giuseppe Verdi. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Acetoso, Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46091-4_3

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Saba’s relationship with Italian culture was fraught with conflict. His poetry was not easily locatable in any of the intellectual trends of his time. Unrecognized by contemporary scholarship, he felt compelled to become his own critic. Saba went so far as to publish a book entitled Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere (History and Chronicle of the Songbook, 1948), in which he analyzed his own work in insightful detail, writing under the pseudonym of Giuseppe Carimandrei. Throughout his œuvre, Saba’s poetic production is marked by a negotiation between a feeling of exclusion and a desperate need to belong—the enduring existential crisis of his life. As a Triestine of Jewish descent, Saba’s problematic relationship to national and cultural identity was a central element of this crisis. While his mother was Jewish, his father and the wet nurse who raised him were both Catholic. Living in Trieste, likewise, exposed him to different and often conflicting trends that added an intellectual dimension to his pervasive sense of isolation. The driving force of Saba’s poetry is opposition—open struggle between conflicting aspects of the self. In the poem “Mio padre” (“My Father”), for example, he describes his soul as “due razze in antica tenzone,” two dueling “races” locked in an ancient struggle. Saba’s poetry finds its raison d’être in the effort to harmonize the two. But rather than the simple binary this image suggests, Saba’s identity was diffracted into many paradoxical components, all present in his poems: his Catholic and Jewish ancestries, his Italian and Central European heritage, his love for his wife Lina and his homosexual tendencies.3 These inner conflicts often erupted into forms of neurosis. In 1929, after reporting numerous nervous collapses, Saba began psychoanalytic treatment with one of the pioneers of the field, Edoardo Weiss (1891–1970), an early apprentice of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). For Saba, psychoanalysis and poetry would become an important pair of complementary tools for investigating the sources of his existential sorrow. Amid the crisis of his inner contradictions, Saba’s devotion to Verdi was striking for its apparent straightforwardness: for him, Verdi was an uncomplicated symbol of national identity. In this chapter, I will discuss Verdi’s role in shaping Saba’s views on nationalism and cultural identity. As we will see, these issues are connected to the poet’s larger interest in opera: operatic forms and textual quotes from Verdi’s librettos punctuate Saba’s poems and are fundamental for tracing the contours of Saba’s concept of “italianità” (“Italianness”).4 Saba’s passion for Verdi involved a great degree of idealization: as I will also show, Saba saw Verdi as a towering

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model of intellectual integrity, a symbol he aspired to emulate. This idealization would ultimately be contrasted with the figure of D’Annunzio, who became for Saba a looming, nationalistic father figure whom the latter would Oedipally “kill” with the help of Verdi. The first scholar to examine Verdi’s influence on Saba was Pierantonio Quarantotti Gambini (1910–1965), who during Saba’s own lifetime compared the poet and the composer, saying that as with Verdi’s music, the true scope of Saba’s artistic relevance went beyond the understanding of his contemporaries: Saba sfugge, in un certo senso, alle definizioni e alla stessa completa comprensione dei critici, come accadde, nel suo tempo e anche più in qua, alla musica di Verdi, cui la sua poesia, per certa natura immediata della sua vena, per il continuo carico di cose vive ch’essa regge, e per la sorprendente e ricchissima novità interiore, sotto un certo aspetto assomiglia.5

According to Gambini, what unites Saba and Verdi is the immediacy of their style, the presence of lived reality in their works, and the novelty that this represented in their times.6 The comparison flattered Saba to the extent that he reprinted the entirety of Gambini’s article in the last chapter of Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere. Saba felt that the critic had properly recognized the innate musicality of his artistic ambitions. Like D’Annunzio, Saba had hoped in his youth to become a musician, and like D’Annunzio he would go on to write poetry that invoked musical forms (e.g. “Preludio e fughe” [1928–1929], written in imitation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s fugues). Furthermore, as with D’Annunzio, Saba’s immense love of opera came in the form of a fixation on librettos, which he read avidly, and in which he claimed to find “a kind of ‘humus’ made up of the debris of the great poetry of the past.”7 Music and a passion for opera inhabit Saba’s best pages, but scholars have paid insufficient attention to the scope of this crucial aspect of the poet’s work. Gambini’s insights into the Verdian undertones in Saba’s poetry did spur some discussion of the poet’s relationship to opera, a debate that was short-lived but that deserves to be revived. The first response to Gambini came in 1968 from musicologist Gianandrea Gavazzeni, who offered a concise discussion of Saba’s relationship to opera, encouraging broader further study of the question. In Gavazzeni’s opinion, Saba’s strongest operatic influence comes from opera verista.8 A year later, Giacomo Debenedetti would write an essay suggesting Saba’s

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poems be read as musical dramas. According to Debenedetti, Saba tends to translate his emotions into characters, the operatic “protagonists” of his Canzoniere. These characters are not only embodiments of the poet’s feelings but also aspire to a universal dimension, one that can be shared by all readers. It is for this effect that Saba eschews the experimentalism of his contemporaries and instead emphasizes musicality through formal characteristics: rhyme, assonance, and meter. For Debenedetti, this is the crux of Saba’s similarity to Verdi,9 a comparison the scholar draws more than once.10 Two decades later, Edoardo Sanguineti would revisit this comparison, focusing on specific episodes in Saba’s poetry where the influence of Verdian librettos is most evident—for instance, the poem “Leonora” (from the collection Cuor morituro [Dying Heart]), inspired by Il trovatore and featuring a refrain—“Non ti scordar mai più/questo, Eleonora mia”—that echoes the tenor Manrico’s farewell from Verdi’s opera: “Non ti scordar di me!/Leonora, addio!” (Il trovatore, IV.1). Sanguineti also recognizes a more general influence of opera on Saba’s poetry, which he locates in the poet’s style and lexicon. The critic rechristens Saba’s poetic language as “melodrammatese,” a neologism meant to evoke the trite vocabulary and the conventional metric structure of most opera librettos.11 In more recent studies, scholars have sought to delve deeper into these questions. Gilberto Lonardi has answered Gavazzeni’s call to better investigate Saba’s love of librettos, highlighting specific cases where Saba quotes them verbatim. Lonardi applies a stylistic analysis to these references, emphasizing their centrality in the development of Saba’s core themes and poetic principles.12 Conversely, Piero Cataldi looks beyond librettos and investigates Saba’s broader affinity for the operatic genre. Cataldi looks at Saba’s identification with Verdi in a psychological light, arguing that Saba saw in Verdi the embodiment of “poetic honesty,” a quality he had idealized in his manifesto “Quello che resta da fare ai poeti” (“What Remains for Poets to Do,” 1911).13 Insightful though their contributions are, these scholars remain within the categories established by Gavazzeni, Sanguinetti, and Debenedetti and thus fall short of articulating the full extent of Saba’s connection to Verdi.14 In the following pages, I will focus on one contour of this connection, aiming to demonstrate the entanglements between Saba’s operatic thematics and his political views and to show how this thematics is an expression of his complex but ardent desire to be part of the Italian cultural tradition. To fully convey this point, however, I must first illustrate the

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influence of Verdi in the context of one of Saba’s poems. I will do so through a close reading of a work that invokes another composer altogether in its title: “Carmen,” from the collection Trieste e una donna (Trieste and a Woman, 1910–1912), a section of Saba’s Canzoniere.

3.2   Carmen and Verdi Georges Bizet’s Carmen,15 based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée, revolves around the timeless themes that will be central to Saba’s Trieste e una donna: love, jealousy, and death. The opera tells the story of a young gypsy woman, the passionate and hot-tempered Carmen, who falls in love with the young corporal Don José. When Carmen is arrested for attacking another woman, she mesmerizes Don José into loosening the rope from her arms so that she can escape. Because of his actions, Don José is sent to jail and demoted. When he is finally released, he again protects Carmen by fighting a superior officer, after which he must leave town, joining a gang of smugglers along with Carmen. When Carmen later abandons him for the young toreador Escamillo, Don José’s jealousy erupts, and the opera ends with his stabbing Carmen to death. Throughout his Canzoniere, Saba adopts the character of Carmen as a double for his wife, Carolina Wölfler (1909–1956),16 and as a broader symbol of female passion.17 The poem “Carmen” itself is about a period when Lina had briefly left him for another man. They had married in 1909, and Lina would return to him and stay until her death in 1956 (shortly before Saba’s own death). But the episode remembered in “Carmen” had awoken a bitter jealousy in Saba, a pain that became infused into the work he was then writing: Coi miei occhi (1912), the original title of what would later be the Trieste e una donna section itself. Saba had originally conceived of this section as a short novel in verse, an account of the awakening that this painful period had led to.18 The opening lines of “Carmen” set the tone of vibrancy and desire, capriciousness and suffering: Torna la mia disperazione a te. Dopo aver tanto errato, oggi il mio amore torna al tuo fiero mutevole ardore, più nulla chiede che la tua onestà. (“Carmen,” 1–4)19

Trieste e una donna has a stark dramatic structure: each poem opens with an explosive epigram and then proceeds with a story-like narrative.

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With this structure, the section functions as a laboratory for what happens in the rest of the Canzoniere. Distinctly musical patterns underlie the section’s poetic diction. Lina’s character, for instance, is marked by phonetic traits associated with her name, particular rhymes and rhythmic patterns.20 Syntactically, this approach achieves a refrain-like structure, and of all the poems in this section, “Carmen” is where Saba displays his penchant for musicality most openly, with lines full of half-rhymes and lilting assonances: Incolpabile amica, austera figlia d’amore, se la vita oggi t’esiglia, con la musica ancora vieni a me. Geloso sono non di don José, non d’Escamillo; di chi prima un canto sciolse alla tua purezza ed al tuo santo coraggio incontro alla tua verità. (“Carmen,” 12–18)21

Music is the vehicle of the poet’s memory (“con la musica ancora vieni a me”), and the memory of Lina is emphatically operatic, not only in her identification with Carmen but also in her evocation of the broader Verdian corpus, as seen in the first line’s “figlia/d’amore,” a reference to the famous quartet in Rigoletto: Bella figlia dell’amore schiavo son dei vezzi tuoi; con un detto sol tu puoi le mie pene consolar. (Rigoletto, III.3)22

To opera connoisseurs, the reference to Rigoletto will bring to mind another famous aria, the Verdian version of Carmen’s (and thus Lina’s) fickleness: “La donna è mobile.”23 In another case of Lina’s being presented through Verdian references, Saba’s “Intermezzo a Lina” borrows librettist Salvadore Cammarano’s words: Ora i tuoi occhi come dolci dardi figgi in me m’accarezzi, e di tutti i tuoi vezzi sorridente mi guardi. Ed io penso che il fuoco di cui ardi sì dolcemente penetra la vita

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nostra, e una preda facile ne fa; che a Carmen assomigli, a Carmençita rosa di voluttà. (“Intermezzo a Lina,” 53–61)24

The line “i tuoi vezzi” echoes the Duke of Mantua’s refrain (“… schiavo son dei vezzi tuoi”) in Rigoletto’s famous quartet. By quoting both this and Carmen simultaneously, Saba cements the link between Verdi and Bizet. There are indeed further Verdian echoes in this poem, specifically two clear allusions to Il trovatore, one of Verdi’s most popular operas in spite of its convoluted plot.25 Set in early fifteenth-century Spain, the opera tells the story of the troubadour Manrico, who fights for the hand of Leonora against a jealous rival, the Count of Luna. Manrico is the son of a gypsy who, imprisoned by the Count, eventually reveals that the two men are actually brothers. Saba’s first allusion is to the last act of the opera: in a moment of jealousy, Manrico turns to Leonora and refuses the freedom that she has obtained for him by promising herself to the Count of Luna: “Io la disprezzo . . ./Pur figgi, o donna, in me gli sguardi!” (Il trovatore, IV,4). More powerfully, in the line “il fuoco di cui ardi” (see above), Saba echoes the opera’s second act, when the Count of Luna’s jealousy erupts in another famous aria, “Il balen del suo sorriso” (“The Flashing of Her Smile”): Ah! L’amor, l’amor ond’ardo le favelli in mio favor! Sperda il sole d’un suo sguardo la tempesta del mio cor. (Il trovatore, II.3)26

The line “l’amore ond’ardo” (“the love that burns in me”) was known to have at times been mistakenly sung as “l’amore è un dardo” (“love is a dart”), a variation also present in the above excerpt from “Intermezzo a Lina.” This intentional mistake adds to the texture of Saba’s interweaving of Verdi and Bizet: in the second scene of act one of Carmen, the tragic heroine throws a dart at Don José’s chest, recalling the popular iconography of love—a heart pierced by an arrow. As this network of allusions shows, Debenedetti was correct in characterizing Saba’s poetry as operatic at its core. But the Bizet-Verdi parallel would go further in later works by Saba. As discussed in the previous

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chapter, Carmen played an important role in the querelle between Nietzsche and Wagner, Bizet’s opera becoming the font of Dionysian vitality that allowed Nietzsche to face his growing disappointment with Wagner’s decadentism.27 Saba encountered Nietzsche only toward the end of World War I, so he had not yet read The Case of Wagner when he wrote “Carmen.” But decades later, in Scorciatoie e raccontini (Shortcuts and Very Short Stories, 1946) and Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere, Saba would present Carmen explicitly in terms of this Nietzschean aspect. To fully assess this development, I must pause for a moment to consider Saba’s Trieste.

3.3   Trieste It was in large part because he was born in Trieste that Saba eschewed the more radical literary vogues of his contemporaries, looking instead to place himself in the traditional Italian canon, idolizing the masters of Italian verse and lauding “poetic honesty” over the blind pursuit of innovation. When Saba was born in 1883, Trieste was still part of the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire and was torn between several conflicting cultural identities. Throughout the Canzoniere, Saba depicts his relationship with Trieste as ambiguous and tormented, and in Storia e cronistoria, he laments the cultural “backwardness” of the city, declaring that being born in Trieste in 1883 was equivalent to being born anywhere else in Europe in 1850.28 We should not, however, take Saba’s indictments at full face value: Trieste’s split identity also had the advantage of making it a crossroads of various intellectual trends, a unique merging of Italian and Germanic currents.29 Saba experienced this merging through the influence of the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903), through Freud’s psychoanalysis, and through Nietzsche. Roberto Deidier, in his introduction to a reprint of Saba’s Ammonizione e altre poesie (Admonition and other Poems, 1932), points also to the influence of Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), a poet whom Saba repeatedly praised, and who exemplifies Saba’s complicated relationship with Central European culture and his own Jewish heritage.30 Although Saba never denied the role played by German authors in his intellectual formation, he did adopt a periodical self-censorship of the names he openly acknowledged. Take, for example, his list of great German authors in the Scorciatoie:

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I grandi autori tedeschi—Goethe, Heine, Nietzsche; altri ancora—sono, più di quelli di qualunque altro popolo, pieni di invettive contro la loro patria. Certamente essi l’amavano; ma—a differenza degli italiani, dei francesi— non volevano assomigliarle.31

Saba lists a predictable group, but the absence of Wagner shows his caution toward the nationalism and anti-Semitism with which the composer became identified. With Nietzsche, on the other hand, Saba emphasizes his personal connection, underscoring it by comparing the philosopher himself to Carmen: Nietzsche, il mio buon Nietzsche (non quello altro e di altri) è così affascinante perché parla all’anima e di cose dell’anima come Carmen parlava d’amore a Don José. “Non ci si annoiava con quella ragazza!” diceva questi a Mérimée, alla vigilia di morire per lei. E nemmeno noi ci annoiamo con Nietzsche. Nietzsche non fu un filosofo; fu il caso estremo di una quasi completa sublimazione di Eros. Fu anche altra cosa; lo so.32

Saba’s personal Nietzsche is one who speaks directly to the human soul, a sublimation of Eros as witnessed by his Carmen-like voice. Most of all, Saba sees Nietzsche as a precursor to Freud’s psychoanalysis: Povero e caro Nietzsche! Si può misurare la spiritualità di un uomo quasi solo dalla sua capacità d’amarlo. E non era un filosofo; era uno psicologo prima dell’analisi. Come l’avrebbe avuta cara! A meno che non avesse preso paura del Superuomo; di quello che il suo inconscio voleva significare con quel disgraziato Superuomo.33

In labeling Nietzsche a psychoanalyst avant la lettre, Saba foreshadows the formula that Gianfranco Contini will later apply to him: that he was concerned with psychoanalysis before knowing anything of Freud.34 For Saba, both Freud and Nietzsche were concerned with the dark side of the human psyche,35 a concern that in Nietzsche’s case materialized in the form of the Superman concept. This does much to explain Saba’s comparison of Nietzsche to Carmen—not just Eros but also a dark force, the unbridled id to Wagner’s Apollonian superego.36 The central complexity of Carmen, for Saba, is her association both with Germany and with the rejection of Germany—at first, she is inextricably linked to Nietzsche, but since she symbolizes Nietzsche’s turning away from Wagner, she also comes to represent Saba’s rejection of at least

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the nationalistic side of his half-German world. This rejection would come through in Saba’s open mocking of Wagner,37 and his view of nationalism as peculiar to the Germans (the “dark side” Nietzsche flirted with in his notion of the Übermensch).38 This rejection opened a certain space for Verdi, making him for Saba an unambiguous emblem of Italian identity. As we saw in “Intermezzo a Lina,” echoes of Bizet’s work are mixed with those of Rigoletto, and elsewhere Saba shows a clear affinity for the other two works of Verdi’s “trilogia popolare”—Il trovatore and La traviata.39 In a short prose piece commemorating Enrico Elia—a fellow triestino who volunteered for World War I and died on the front, and whose writings Saba edited and helped publish40—Saba discusses Italian interventionism, drawing an analogy between the passion that filled young interventionists and the effect of Verdi’s music: “L’interventismo italiano, come fu vissuto dalla migliore gioventù del tempo, ebbe qualcosa di irruente e di spontaneo. Scoppiò nei cuori come una melodia di Verdi. E, come una melodia di Verdi, non sopportò di essere condotto troppo in lungo.”41

This analogy plays on Verdi’s popular reputation as “vate del Risorgimento.” As George Martin has shown, Verdi put his stamp on this era—by scoring the soundtrack for this period of national turmoil, Verdi became inseparable from the Italian unification effort.42 During the occupation by Austria, it was common to find “Viva V.E.R.D.I.” painted on the walls of Italian cities, where the name of the composer served as an acronym: “Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia” (“Long Live Vittorio Emanuele II King of Italy”). Verdi’s biography fit in with this role: he himself frequented the literary salon of the Countess Clara Maffei, where men of letters—thinkers and patriots like Carlo Cattaneo and Tommaso Grossi—gathered to discuss the future of a unified Italian republic.43 It would thus later be natural for the public to see his arias and choruses in a patriotic light, the best example being the chorus “Va pensiero” from the third act of Nabucco (1842). In this chorus, the exiled Jews in Babylon voice their desire to return to their home. “Va pensiero” acquired an almost mythical status for its impact on the Italian unification cause, giving patriots a rallying cry that sang the biblical proportions of the foreign occupation they suffered:

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Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate, va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli, ove olezzano tepide e molli l’aure dolci del suolo natal! (Nabucco, III.4)44

Despite all this, it must not be forgotten that Verdi was reluctant to participate in the Risorgimento struggle itself.45 His active association with the cause does not begin before the great turmoil of the 1840s, and it is still debated whether his operas contained any deliberate political messages. While his work undoubtedly boosted support for the unification effort, Verdi himself aimed above all for popular appeal. As Massimo Mila has observed, Verdi seemed to heed Mazzini’s 1833 call, in Filosofia della musica,  for a newly popular form of drama: “Giuseppe Mazzini invoca l’avvento del ‘dramma musicale,’ ed auspica la nobilitazione del recitativo, lo sviluppo del coro e un maggiore ‘studio dell’istrumentazione,’ a sanare le piaghe del melodramma . . . Non bastava più, infatti, ‘perpetuare o rifare una scuola italiana’; occorreva esprimere ‘dall’Italia’ le fondamenta di una scuola musicale europea.”46 Verdi’s success in creating this popular art set a crucial example for Saba, who wanted his poetry to reach as broad an audience as it could. In Verdi, Saba likewise found a figure who framed this popularism in terms of civic unity, something that again paralleled the rejection of Wagner and German nationalism.47 As Verdi himself puts it in an 1870 letter to the Countess Maffei, Che i nostri letterati ed i nostri politici vantino pure il sapere, le scienze, e perfino (Dio glielo perdoni) le arti di questi vincitori [the German people]; ma se guardassero un po’ in dentro vedrebbero che nelle loro vene scorre sempre l’antico sangue goto, che sono d’uno smisurato orgoglio, duri, intolleranti, sprezzatori di tutto ciò che non è germanico, e d’una rapacità che non ha limiti. Uomini di testa, ma senza cuore; razza forte, ma non civile.48

In short, given Saba’s yearning for a national identity, it is easy to see why he became devoted to Verdi—to see the political and cultural statement he made by lauding Verdi over Wagner. But deep artistic concerns also connected Saba to Verdi. Cataldi, examining the debt that “Trieste e una donna” owes to Verdi’s realism, characterizes this realism above all as a faithful portraiture of the eighteenth-century Italian family, in its cultural

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and interpersonal dynamics.49 In arguing this, Cataldi builds on the important formula of Luigi Baldacci, who, in his landmark study of librettos as literary texts, asserts that most of Verdi’s theater revolves around a central theme: “contro il padre” (“against the father”).50

3.4   Overthrowing the Father Saba’s Canzoniere, too, revolves around a conflict with his father, who abandoned him when he was a teenager. His anger “contro il padre” is voiced most openly in the “Autobiografia” section: “Mio padre è stato per me ‘l’assassino,’/Fino ai vent’anni che l’ho conosciuto.”51 Surrounded as he was by the Freudianism present in Trieste, Saba became aware that a strong Oedipal drive was present in his relation not only to his father, but also to paternal figures in general. This drive would play a role in his political views—in one passage of the Scorciatoia, he declares that Italians, if they ever wished to mount a proper revolution, must break from their fratricidal habits and embrace patricide: Gli italiani non sono parricidi; sono fratricidi. Romolo e Remo, Ferruccio e Maramaldo, Mussolini e i socialisti, Badoglio e Graziani . . . Gli italiani sono l’unico popolo (credo) che abbiano, alla base della loro storia (o della loro leggenda) un fratricidio. Ed è solo col parricidio che si inizia una rivoluzione. Gli italiani vogliono darsi al padre, ed avere da lui, in cambio, il permesso di uccidere gli altri fratelli.52

But within his own art, there would be one crucial father: Gabriele D’Annunzio, whom Saba would “kill” by replacing him with Verdi. Saba openly acknowledged D’Annunzio’s influence on his work (in particular his early poetry),53 as well as his cultural role, calling D’Annunzio a “classic of Italian literature.”54 In the short story “Il bianco immacolato signore” (“The White Immaculate Gentleman”), Saba recalls his first encounter with D’Annunzio.55 An adolescent at the time, Saba worshipped the elder poet, imitating his fashion choices and cultivating a physical resemblance to him. But when he finally met D’Annunzio at the latter’s summerhouse in the Tuscan region of Versilia, Saba found a bored man, wrapped up in his own thoughts and aching to be left alone. Saba recalls that the elder poet’s only concern was to have Wagner played on the piano.56

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This story marks the apex of Saba’s admiration for D’Annunzio, and the moment that admiration began to decline. Saba would go on to reject D’Annunzio entirely, mocking him with such ironic titles as “L’Immaginifico” (“The Imaginative”), “Il Vate” (“The Bard”), and “L’Eroe” (“The Hero”), and in one instance drawing attention to his premature aging.57 By the end of World War I, Saba had come to despise the self-celebration that was a hallmark of D’Annunzio’s poetry. This egoism not only led Saba to label D’Annunzio’s poetry trite (“di maniera”),58 but also to label the poet himself the incarnation of poetic dishonesty. In “Quello che resta da fare ai poeti,” Saba contrasts the “true poetry” of Manzoni with D’Annunzio’s falsities.59 Certainly, a large factor in this rift was Saba and D’Annunzio’s differing opinions of Nietzsche—when Saba says “my Nietzsche, not others’,”60 the “others” refers to D’Annunzio. But their deepest division would be over Verdi. In 1911, D’Annunzio was asked to compose an ode to Verdi. Although the poet’s true opinion of the composer remains a matter of speculation, the portrait he offers in this ode is that of a superhuman figure, baptized at birth by the spirits of Dante, Leonardo, and Michelangelo: Si chinaron su lui tre vaste frondi terribili, col pondo degli eterni pensieri e del dolore: Dante Alighieri che sorresse il mondo in suo pugno ed i fonti dell’universa vita ebbe in suo cuore; Leonardo, signore di verità, re dei dominii oscuri, fissa pupilla a’ rai de’ Soli ignoti; il ferreo Buonarroti che animò del suo gran disdegno in duri massi gli imperituri figli, i ribelli eroi silenziosi onde il Destino è vinto. (“Per la morte di Giuseppe Verdi,”1–14)61

D’Annunzio casts Verdi as a son of the Italian “Patria” (33–37) and the “gloria dei Latini” (83). In “Il bianco immacolato signore,” Saba jokes about this poem, saying that over time he disliked it more and more, while his love of Verdi’s music grew and grew.62 In a letter to his wife and daughter, however, Saba seems to reserve affection for one line from the poem:

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Ma quello che più mi ha commosso è stato un bigliettino anonimo, che ho ricevuto ieri e nel quale era scritto a macchina il verso che D’Annunzio scrisse in morte di Giuseppe Verdi: “Pianse ed amò per tutti.” Questo lo considero il massimo dei miei successi letterari.63

But Saba’s affection is ironic: there is an Oedipal rebellion in his claim that D’Annunzio’s line is one of his (Saba’s) great successes (“il massimo dei miei successi letterari”). Saba mimics D’Annunzio’s arrogance: by symbolically usurping this line, Saba is himself being D’Annunzian. Part of the irony is the fact that the line itself speaks against the ethics of possession, evoking the universality of love and suffering. And this, of course, was the hallmark of what Saba appreciated in Verdi—his appeal to the universal. Finally, Saba would later make this usurpation a reality, actually re-­phrasing and repurposing the line in one of his poems: “Non quello che di te scrivono sotto./Pianse e capì per tutti era il tuo motto” (“Tre poesie alla Musa,” from the collection Mediterranee [1945–48]).64 He thus overcomes and replaces the paternal figure of D’Annunzio, drawing attention to the Freudian dynamic at play by replacing “amò” with the cerebral “capì.” In one of his famous Scorciatoie, Saba cites the two verses he believes to be the most beautiful in Italian poetry: a verse from Canto V of Dante’s Inferno and a line written by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791–1863).65 Finally, he adds a third verse, from Piave’s libretto for Verdi’s Ernani (1844): “Udite or tutti del mio cor gli affanni.”66 The reference invokes Verdi’s status as political symbol: Ernani (set in 1519) is about a revolutionary bandit who attempted to overthrow Don Carlo, the King of Spain and the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The political undertones of this antecedent—which made the opera one of the most popular of the Risorgimento—are made clear by Saba, who praises a favorite line67 by calling it “italianissimo,” and suggests that its performance is equivalent to hoisting an Italian flag on stage.68 If Verdi became a Risorgimento symbol for the struggle of young revolutionaries, in post-unification Italy he met the need to create living national monuments around which the new Italian monarchy could build a sense of national identity. Later, during the years of the so-called “Verdi Renaissance” (a period in the 1920s when Verdi’s music was rediscovered both in Italy and abroad), Verdi’s status as a symbol of Italianness was confirmed. And in the aftermath of World War II, his music would be used

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in the hope of restoring a long-lost national cohesion. For Saba, the need to monumentalize Verdi was personal, intellectual, and political: Fu una sera, in caserma. Ero solo nella bianca immensa camerata, quando un altro consegnato (Gobbetta si chiamava; era lombardo, anzi milanese) entrò improvvisamente, cantando “Bella figlia dell’amore.” Tutta l’Italia, con i suoi mari, i suoi monti, le sue città, mi entrò nel cuore come un fulgore azzurro.69

This passage recalls the atmosphere of Versi militari, a series of poems that Saba composed during his military service, celebrating the sense of community he achieved with his fellow soldiers. Here one of Rigoletto’s most famous arias—“Bella figlia dell’amore”—takes Saba down a Proustian memory path, reconnecting him with Italy and with his own intimate need to participate in the destiny of the nation. In poems like “Intermezzo” and “Carmen,” Saba merges Verdi’s voice with Bizet’s, finding in this “marriage” an expression of the psychological tone he found in Nietzsche, and a demonstration of the political lucidity and focus he thought possible in opera. Saba was quick to distinguish his feelings toward Italy from nationalism: for him the distinction was crucial to the role he hoped to attain in the Italian literary canon. In a short prose work called “Trieste,” he rejects nationalism outright: Non sono un nazionalista; non voglio buttare olio sul fuoco, e so che ci siamo messi, anche più del necessario, dalla cattiva parte. Ma se le cose alle quali ho accennato—poesie, quadri, romanzi—hanno ancora un peso, pesano—senza contropartita—sul nostro piatto della bilancia.70

Saba contrasts nationalism with pride in one’s cultural heritage: his own pride in the Italian heritage would in fact allow him to embrace Trieste’s liminal condition, making its cultural and intellectual mix his own. Saba’s response to nationalism was thus to replace it with a “civic” ethos—the solidarity and responsibility of fellow citizens. This civic ethos was something he tried to attain through literature—even if he was not born an Italian citizen, he could work to forge a place in the pantheon of the “biblioteca civica” of his youth. Why (to return to the opening points of this chapter) was Verdi not included in this pantheon? Because, as I have argued here, he was something more than just a literary predecessor—he was the very gateway that would allow Saba to find his place in this

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pantheon. The universalism that Verdi represented meant that he was not, for Saba, a patriarchal figure like D’Annunzio, not a father to be overthrown, but a guide into the self and into the dimension of artistic selfexpression that Saba had always sought.

Notes 1. In the preface to his 1921 Canzoniere, Saba writes about his early work: “O ero forse troppo giovane ancora per compiacermi, come me ne compiaccio adesso, dell’inoppugnabile derivazione petrarchesca e leopardiana di quei primi sonetti e canzoni . . . quasi che l’aver ritrovato da solo, nella mia stanzetta a Trieste, così beatamente remota da ogni influenza d’arte, e quando nessuno ancora aveva parlato a me di buoni e di cattivi autori, il filo d’oro della tradizione italiana, non sia il maggior titolo di nobiltà, la migliore testimonianza che uno possa avere di non essere un comune illuso verseggiatore.” (Or perhaps I was too young to be pleased, as I am pleased now, with the Petrarchan and Leopardian derivation of those early sonnets and songs . . . as if, having found by myself, in my little bedroom in Trieste, so blissfully remote from any artistic influence, and when nobody had yet spoken to me of good and bad authors, the golden thread of the Italian tradition, the greatest title of nobility, the best testimony that one can have of not being a common, deluded versifier). Umberto Saba, “Ai miei lettori,” Tutte le prose, ed. Arrigo Stara (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 1129. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. In this regard, Saba writes, speaking of himself in the third person: “Questo bisogno di ricollegarsi al passato . . . ha in lui origini profonde . . . Ricordiamo anche, ma questo in sottordine, la sua ‘triestinità’; per un triestino i versi dei poeti italiani—la tradizione insomma—aveva un valore ‘sentimentale’ maggiore che per gli altri italiani” (This need to connect with the past has deep roots in him . . . We should also recall, however incidentally, that he was from Trieste and that for a Triestine the works of the great Italian poets—tradition, in other words—had more “sentimental” value than for other Italians). Saba, Tutte le prose, 193. Trans. Sartarelli, History and Chronicle of the Songbook, 78. 3. Saba never openly admitted his homosexuality in either his works or his public statements. However, in the novel Ernesto, published posthumously in 1975 by his daughter Linuccia, he recounted the sexual initiation of a young boy in late nineteenth-century Trieste. Literary critics conventionally consider Ernesto, the protagonist of the novel, as yet another literary ­persona for Saba, thus taking this book as a confession. After the publication of Ernesto, scholars began to seek traces of homoerotic motifs in

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Saba’s previous works. Among the most recent contributions, Massimiliano Jattoni attempts to identify previous references to the poet’s homosexuality in Storia e cronistoria, and hypothesizes an involvement between Saba and his protégée, the poet Sandro Penna (1906–1977), in “‘Gli umani amori’: La tematica omoerotica nell’opera di Umberto Saba,” Rivista di letteratura italiana 1 (2004): 31–46. Luca Baldoni focuses on Saba’s homoerotic representation of the male body in “‘L’uccello alto nella notte’: corpo e spazio omoerotico nella poesia italiana del Novecento,” The Italianist 1 (2006): 92–113. In another article—“Un vecchio amava un ragazzo: Homoeroticism in Umberto Saba’s late poetry (1935–1948),” Italian Studies 2 (2005): 221–239—Baldoni interprets the poems written between 1935 and 1948 as a chronicle of Saba’s love for his young pupil Federico Almansi. More recently, in “Gli ‘alleati’ di Saba,” Rivista di letteratura italiana 1 (2008): 55–63, Pietro Frassica analyzes Ernesto as the culmination of a slow process of liberation and self-acceptance. 4. While Verdi never wrote his own librettos, he controlled every aspect of their creation. Massimo Mila famously called Verdi “il più temibile torturatore di librettisti che si sia mai conosciuto”—the most fearsome torturer of librettists ever known (Massimo Mila, Verdi (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000), 182). Gabriele Baldini characterizes Verdi’s librettists as essentially secretaries, writing from Verdi’s dictations (Baldini thus talks about “lo stile letterario di Verdi”—Verdi’s literary style—in Abitare la battaglia: La storia di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan: Garzanti, 2001), 142). During the composition of Rigoletto, for example, Verdi asked Francesco Maria Piave for such intricate changes as this: “Vorrei che adoperassi un po’ di lima in quella benedetta aria del Duca, e ciò per te: per me ho bisogno che alla fine del Recitativo dopo il verso ‘Ella mi fu rapita!’ve ne fosse un altro endecasillabo (‘Chi fu l’iniquo? Ma ne troverò vendetta!’) poi un ultimo verso dolce, ma non vorrei che fosse quello che c’è perché ‘Ah senza Lei languir sento la vita’ non vuol dire niente” (I would like you to file down a bit that blessed air of the Duke: at the end of the Recitative, after the verse “She was kidnapped from me!,” I need to have another hendecasyllable (“Who was the criminal? But I’ll find revenge!”), then a final, sweet verse, though not what it is now, because “Ah, without her, in languishing I feel my life” does not mean anything). (Verdi, Lettere, 213–14). Saba, in sum, is not completely wrong in failing to make a clear distinction between Verdi and his librettists. 5. Saba, Tutte le prose, 335: “In a certain sense, Saba eludes the definitions and the full comprehension of critics, as was also the case, in its own time and even more recently, with the music of Verdi, which his poetry—for the immediacy of its tone, for the continuous charge of living things that it ­carries and for its surprising and very rich inner novelty—actually resembles in certain respects.” Trans. Sartarelli, 210.

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6. Pierantonio Quarantotti Gambini also invokes the comparison to Verdi in a letter written to Saba on May 15, 1946: “Mi è piaciuta molto anche la poesia ‘Raccontino,’ che ho letta nella ‘Fiera letteraria.’ Quante sono le Mediterranee? Torno a pensare che lei rassomiglia, sotto un altro aspetto, un po’ a Verdi. A una certa età i poeti italiani non scrivono più, o scrivono cose appesantite, piene di orpello, artificiali, pensate più che sentite. Questa è la regola generale; ma lei esce da questa regola. Questa dovrebbe essere una ragione, nel nostro mondo, di meraviglia e di gioia” (I also liked the poem “Raccontino,” which I read in “Fiera letteraria.” How many poems are in Mediterranee? I cannot help but think that you resemble Verdi, under some other aspect. At a certain age, Italian poets no longer write, or they write things that are weighed down, full of tinsel, artificial, cerebral more than heartfelt. This is the general rule, but it does not apply to you. This should be a reason, in our world, for wonder and joy). Umberto Saba and Pierantonio Quarantotti Gambini, Il vecchio e il giovane: Carteggio 1930–1957, ed. Linuccia Saba (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1965), 51. 7. Sartarelli, 120. 8. Gianandrea Gavazzeni, “Fra poesia e musica,” Nuova rivista musicale2 (1968): 1089–1091. 9. Giacomo Debenedetti, “Saba,” Poesia italiana del Novecento: quaderni inediti (Milan: Garzanti, 1980), 125–173. See also Giacomo Debenedetti, Saggi critici: serie I (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1969), 109–179. 10. Giacomo Debenedetti, “Ultime cose su Saba,” Nuovi argomenti 30 (January–February, 1958): 1–19. 11. Sanguineti does not expand further on his idea of “melodrammatese.” With this formula he alludes to a very generic language allegedly common to all opera librettos, without specifying a period or national tradition. Edoardo Sanguineti, “Saba e il melodramma,” La missione del critico (Genoa: Marietti, 1987). The article was first published in L’ombra d’Argo5–6 (1985): 80–87. The article later appeared in the proceedings of a 1984 conference on Saba’s relationship with Central European culture. See Rosita Tordi, ed., Umberto Saba, Triestee la cultura mitteleuropea (Milan: Fondazione Mondadori, 1986). 12. See Gilberto Lonardi, Il fiore dell’addio: Leonora, Manrico e altri fantasmi del melodramma nella poesia di Montale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 20–33. 13. Piero Cataldi, “Saba e Verdi,” L’ombra d’Argo5–6 (1985): 45–55. 14. Moreover, they do nothing to resolve the tensions present between these scholars. Gavazzeni, referring to Quarantotti Gambini, Debenedetti, and Folco Portinari, states: “Fuori strada tutti, dunque, i critici di Saba, circa il ‘verdismo.’ Fuorviati dalla radicale incomprensione musicale” (All these critics missed the point when discussing Saba’s Verdian influences, misled

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by their radical incomprehension of music). Gavazzeni, “Fra poesia e musica,” 1089. 15. Carmen was first performed on March 3, 1875 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris and met with little success, despite 36 consecutive performances. The libretto, written by Henry Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, is based on the 1845 novel Carmen by Prosper Mérimée. 16. “In Carmen, una poesia che si rivolge al personaggio descritto da Mérimée e cantato da Bizet, il paragone Carmen-Lina (non sappiamo se obiettivamente esatto, ma caro al poeta) è evidente, sebbene sottaciuto. Dispiacciono di questa poesia i riferimenti troppo scoperti al melodramma di cui prende il nome. (Sui rapporti fra Saba e il melodramma avremo spesso occasione di discorrere, e non per farne, come questa volta un rimprovero al poeta)” (In “Carmen,” a poem about the character created by Mérimée and set to music by Bizet, the Carmen-Lina comparison [one dear to the poet, though we are not in a position to judge its objective accuracy] is obvious, though left unstated. [We shall have frequent occasion to discuss Saba’s relationship to opera, and not, as here, to reproach him for it]). Saba, Tutte le prose, 153. Trans. Sartarelli, 41. 17. Saba first referred to Carmen in “Durante una marcia”: “O canta, Carmen, le bellezze tue,/le lodi in coro della tua persona./Il cielo, senza mai piovere, tuona” (O he sings, Carmen, of your beauty,/the praises in chorus of your person./The heavens thunder, rain never comes). Umberto Saba, Tutte le poesie, ed. Arrigo Stara (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 43. Trans. G. Hochfield, Songbook. The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba, 31. 18. “Alcuni hanno parlato di Trieste e una donna come di un ‘romanzetto.’ Non, si capisce, che Saba si sia proposto di scrivere qualcosa come… un romanzo in versi . . . Il libro, nato dalla vita, dal ‘romanzo’ della vita era esso stesso, approssimativamente, un piccolo romanzo. Bastava lasciare alle poesie il loro ordine cronologico; non disturbare, con importune trasposizioni, lo spontaneo fluire e trasfigurarsi in poesia della vita” (Some have spoken of Trieste and a Woman as a kind of “novelette.” Not, of course, that Saba ever had in mind to write anything like a novel in verse . . . this book, born of the life, of the “novel” of the life, was itself, roughly speaking, a little novel. He had only to leave the poems in their chronological order to avoid disturbing, with bothersome transpositions, the spontaneous flow and transfiguration of life into poetry). Saba, Tutte le prose, 145. Trans. Sartarelli, 33. 19. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 96: “My despair turns back to you./After having erred so long, today my love/returns to your fierce, mutable ardor,/asking nothing more than your honesty.” 20. In this poem Saba uses regular rhymes, whose repetition contributes to the contradictory, conflicting portrayals of his wife. The most prominent of

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these rhymes are “figlia/esiglia,” “a me/don Josè,” “canto/santo.” The austere daughter of love—as mentioned, an echo of Rigoletto—is an oxymoron that underscores the conflict between Lina’s morality and the licentiousness of the operatic character Saba evokes. The rhyme “figlia/esiglia” also creates an assonance with “Escamillo,” the toreador who steals Carmen’s heart, and is an allusion to Saba’s romantic rival in real life. The rhyme “me/don Josè,” by contrast, creates continuity between Saba and Carmen’s first love in Bizet’s opera. Ultimately, the rhyme “canto/santo” underscores Saba’s desire to celebrate his wife’s goodness, in juxtaposition with the (alleged) licentiousness she displayed when she left him—he seeks to redeem her with the poem. Saba had already adopted a similar strategy before the composition of “Trieste e una donna” in the poem “A Lina” (in “Poesie dell’adolescenza e giovanili”), which employs the rhyming pattern “chiù” “fu” “chiù” “fu”: “Primieramente udii nella solenne/notte un richiamo: il chiù/Dell’amore che fu,/Lina mi risovvenne” (At first I heard a solemn call/in the solemn night: the Chiù/Reminded me of Lina,/of the love it was). Saba, Tutte le poesie, 96. 21. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 96: “Blameless friend, austere daughter/of love, if life today exiles you,/the music brings you back to me./Jealous I am not of Don Jose,/not of Escamillo; of whom, first, a song/dedicated to your purity and to your holy/courage, to meet your truth.” Italics mine. 22. Francesco Maria Piave, Rigoletto, III.3: “Beautiful daughter of love,/I am the slave of your charms;/With a single word you can/Console my sufferings.” Giuseppe Verdi, Libretti (Milan: Mondadori, 2000), 74. Italics mine. Trans. William Weaver, Verdi Librettos (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963), 61. 23. “La donna è mobile/qual piuma al vento/muta d’accento/e di pensier” (Woman is fickle/Like a feather in the wind,/She changes her words/And her thoughts). Rigoletto III,1, in Verdi, Libretti, 72. Trans. Weaver, 57. 24. Saba, “Intermezzo a Lina,” vv. 53–61: “Now your eyes like sweet darts/ pierce me, you caress me,/and look at me, you and your habits./And I think that the fire that burns in you/so sweetly penetrates our life,/makes it an easy prey;/because you are like Carmen, like Carmencita/voluptuously pink.” Saba, Tutte le poesie, 84. Italics mine. 25. Il trovatore was first performed on January 19, 1853 at the Teatro Apollo in Rome. The libretto, written by Salvadore Cammarano (1801–1852), is based on Antonio Garcìa Gutierrez’s play El Trovador (1863). I discuss this opera more extensively in Chap. 6. 26. Salvadore Cammarano, Il trovatore, II.3: “Ah, let the love that enflames me/Speak to her in my favor,/Let the sun of her glance/Dispel the storm in my heart.” Verdi, Libretti, 108. Italics mine. Trans. Weaver, 117–119. 27. See Chap. 2.

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28. “Le origini triestine di Saba hanno avuto anche, come conseguenza, di farne, almeno agli inizi, un arretrato. (Dal punto di vista della cultura, nascere a Trieste nel 1883 era come nascere altrove nel 1850.) Quando il poeta era ancora giovanissimo, e già, in Italia come in tutto il resto del mondo, si preparavano o erano in atto esperienze stilistiche di ogni genere, la città di Saba era ancora, per quel poco che aveva di vita culturale, ai tempi del Risorgimento: una città romantica” (Saba’s Triestine origins also resulted in his being, at least in the beginning, somewhat backward. (From a cultural perspective, being born in Trieste in 1883 was like being born in 1850 anywhere else.) When the poet was still very young, stylistic experiments of every sort were in the offing or already under way in Italy, as in every other part of the world. Saba’s city, however, in the little cultural life it had, was still living in the time of the Risorgimento). Saba, Tutte le prose, 115. Trans. Sartarelli, 4. 29. Mario Lavagetto discusses the relationship of Triestine writers to their home city in “Nascere a Trieste nel 1883” (“Being Born in Trieste in 1883”). Lavagetto, La gallina di Saba (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), 211–238. 30. Roberto Deidier, “Introduction to Umberto Saba,” Ammonizione e altre poesie (Genoa: San Marco dei Giustiniani, 2003), 7–27. 31. Saba, Tutte le prose, 38: “The great German authors—Goethe, Heine, Nietzsche, and many others—are, more than any other people, full of invectives against their own homeland. They certainly loved it, but—unlike the Italians and the French—they did not want to look like it.” 32. Saba, Tutte le prose, 31: “NIETZSCHE, my Nietzsche, my good Nietzsche (not that Nietzsche of others) is so fascinating because he speaks to one’s soul and about the soul in the way Carmen spoke to Don José about love. ‘One never gets tired of that girl!’ he told Mérimée, just before dying for her. And we never get tired of Nietzsche. Nietzsche wasn’t a philosopher. He was the epitome of an almost complete sublimation of Eros. He was other things too, I know.” Trans. Sartarelli, 179. 33. Saba, Tutte le prose, 863: “Poor and dear Nietzsche! The spirituality of a man can be measured almost by his ability to love him. And he was not a philosopher: he was a psychologist before psychoanalysis. He would have loved it! Unless he was afraid of the Superman; of what his unconscious intended with that unfortunate Superman.” 34. Gianfranco Contini writes: “Saba nasceva psicanalitico prima della psicanalisi, era un soggetto di critique psychanalytique allo stesso titolo che, in certe Réflexionsdi Thibaudet, Turgienev è preso come soggetto della critica psicologica bourgettiana” (Saba was born a psychoanalyst before psychoanalysis, he was a subject of psychanalytical critique in the same way that, in Thibaudet’s Réflexions sur le roman, Turgenev is taken as the subject of

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a psychological analysis à la Bourget). Contini, Un anno di letteratura (Florence: Le Monnier, 1946), 92. 35. Commenting on the poem “Chiaretta”—from the collection Preludio e canzonette—Saba remarks on Nietzsche’s role in the development of his poetry, imagining Nietzsche as a psychologist, and seeing his work as a precursor of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. He writes: “‘Quante più cose afferma/l’anima, e meno nega!’ In questi ultimi due versi, come in molti altri di Saba si avverte l’influenza indiretta di quello che fu uno dei suoi buoni ‘maestri di vita,’ in questo caso di Nietzsche; non del Nietzsche del Superuomo che affascinò il D’Annunzio e troppi altri, ma del Nietzsche psicologo che tante verità intuì dell’anima umana, per cui la sua opera può essere considerata anche come un immenso preludio alle scoperte del Freud” (“How many more things my heart/affirms, and less denies!” In these last two lines, as in many others, one notes the indirect influence of someone who was one of his good “teachers of life,” namely Nietzsche— not Nietzsche of the Superman, who fascinated D’Annunzio and too many others with him, but Nietzsche the psychologist, who intuited many truths about the human soul, and whose work, for this reason, can be considered as a vast foreshadowing of the discoveries of Freud). Saba, Tutte le prose, 197–98. Trans. Sartarelli, 83. In his remarks on the poem “Il piccolo Berto,” Saba notes the influence on his collection of aphorisms entitledScorciatoie e raccontini (Shortcuts and Very Short Stories, 1946), and writes: “In queste prose . . . egli si appoggia, senza nasconderlo . . . a quelli che furono i suoi due buoni maestri: a Nietzsche cioè e a Freud” (In these prose writings . . . he relies, without hiding it . . . on the two thinkers from whom he learned most: Nietzsche and Freud). Saba, Tutte le prose, 262. Trans. Sartarelli, 143. In this regard, in fact, the last aphorism of the book declares the intellectual precedent for the whole collection: “165. GENEALOGIA DI SCORCIATOIE Nietzsche—Freud.” Saba, Tutte le prose, 79. 36. Gennaro Savarese describes this phenomenon as the “complesso di Carmen” (the “Carmen Complex”), a tendency in Belle Époque Europe to hold Carmen as a symbol of all feminine sexuality. Savarese, “I colori di Carmen,” in Umberto Saba: Trieste e la cultura mitteleuropea, 301–14. For a psychoanalytic reading of the Carmen myth, see also Franco Fornari, Carmen adorata: Psicanalisi della donna demoniaca (Milan: Longanesi, 1985). 37. For instance, Saba jokes about Wagner while remembering his friend Dionisio Romanelli: “Diceva non esser bello Wagner, ma quello che si trova, uscendo da teatro, dopo aver ascoltato per quattro ore Wagner” (He claimed that Wagner’s music was not beautiful, but rather that everything outside the theater became beautiful when you left it after four hours of

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listening to Wagner). Saba, Tutte le prose, 286. Saba also mocked Wagner’s followers: “I WAGNERIANI erano sospetti, non perché amavano Wagner; ma perché amavano solo Wagner” (Wagnerians were suspected not because they loved Wagner, but because they loved only Wagner). Saba, Tutte le prose, 19. 38. Saba explains the public’s aversion to his poem “L’uomo” (The Man) in psychoanalytic terms, framing the rejection not as an aesthetic judgement but as a subconscious reaction to the poem’s content. The poet likens this to the poor reception of French Symbolism and to Germans’ aversion to the music of Wagner. He explains the latter as a resistance to the racism they subconsciously identified in the composer’s music: “la lunga difesa opposta dai tedeschi alla musica di Wagner (difesa per cui Nietzsche li lodava altamente) . . . era, come si vide poi, una difesa contro il nazismo e il razzismo avanti lettera, che si fa sentire nella musica di Wagner, e per i quali i tedeschi non erano ancora maturi, vogliamo dire non abbastanza progrediti nel cammino della regressione” (The Germans’ long opposition to the music of Wagner [for which Nietzsche praised them highly] . . . was, as later was seen, an opposition to the Nazism and racism avant la lettre that one can hear in Wagner’s music, which the Germans were not yet ripe for, not having yet progressed far enough, that is, on the road of regression). Saba, Tutte le prose, 241. Trans. Sartarelli, 124. 39. See Nora Baldi, Il paradiso di Saba (Milan: Mondadori, 1958), 49: “‘Sulla vetta non si può rimanere in eterno’ mi diceva, ‘senza mentire.’ Amava paragonare la sua prosaicità al zum-pai-pai di Verdi. (Nella Traviata, opera che fra tutte prediligeva, molti sono infatti gli ‘intervalli’ di prosa che alternano la poesia del ‘Amami Alfredo’)” (“On the summit one cannot remain forever” he would say to me, “without lying.” He liked to compare his prosaicness to Verdi’s zum-pai-pai. [In La traviata, the opera he privileged above all others, there are many “intervals” of prose alternated with the poetry of “Love me, Alfredo”]). 40. Enrico Elia, Scritti di Enrico Elia (Milan: Caddeo, 1922). 41. “Di questo libro e di un altro mondo” (1946): “Italian interventionism, as experienced by the best of that time’s youth, had something both impetuous and spontaneous. It penetrated into their hearts like a melody by Verdi. And, just like a melody by Verdi, it could not have been sustained for too long.” Saba, Tutte le prose, 901. 42. “Great men sometimes can put a personal stamp on an event or episode; besides articulating it, they can help to shape it . . . such stamping, of course, is reciprocal: the man affects the era, and the era, the man. With Verdi the era was the Risorgimento, a period in Italian political and social history that roughly spans the nineteenth century.” George Martin, Aspects of Verdi (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1988), 3.

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43. For a reflection on the vexed topic of Verdi’s ties to the Italian unification effort, see Mary Ann Smart, “Verdi, Italian Romanticism, and the Risorgimento,” in Cambridge Companion to Verdi, ed. Scott Balthazar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–45. For a discussion of the political content of Verdi’s operas see Mary Ann Smart, “Liberty On (and Off) the Barricades: Verdi’s Risorgimento Fantasies,” in Making and Remaking Italy: The Formation of Cultural Identity around the Risorgimento, ed. Albert Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 103–18. 44. Temistocle Solera, Nabucco (III.4): “Fly, thought, on wings of gold./Go, settle upon the slopes and the hills,/Where the sweet, golden air/Of our native land smells soft and warm.” Verdi, Libretti, 26. 45. In 1859, Verdi wrote to Clara Maffei and confessed his reluctance to fight in the war of independence: “Ciò dico a voi, e ben in segreto: non lo direi ad altri, ché non vorrei si credesse vana millanteria. Ma che potrei io fare, che non sono capace di fare una marcia di tre miglia, la testa non regge a cinque minuti di sole, e un po’ di vento od un po’ d’umidità mi produce dei mali di gola da cacciarmi in letto qualche volta per settimane? Meschina la natura mia! Buono a nulla!” (I can tell you this in secret: I would not tell others, because I would not want to be accused of braggadocio. But what could I possibly do? I am not able to march for three miles, my head cannot sustain five minutes in the sun, and a bit of wind or some humidity gives such terrible sore throats as to put me in bed for weeks? My nature is weak! I am good for nothing!) June 23, 1859. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds.,I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan: Tipografia Stucchi Ceretti & c., 1913), 577 and 443. See also Carlo Graziani, ed., Giuseppe Verdi: Autobiografia dalle lettere (Milan: Mondadori, 1941), 263–64. 46. “Giuseppe Mazzini invokes the advent of the ‘musical drama,’ and hopes for the ennobling of the recitative, the development of the choir and a greater ‘study of the instrumentation,’ in order to heal the sores of the melodrama . . . In fact, it was no longer enough to ‘perpetuate or redo an Italian school’; it was necessary to express ‘from Italy’ the foundations of a European musical school.” Mila, Breve storia della musica, 268. On this issue, see also Smart, “Liberty On (and Off) the Barricades,” 113–14. 47. Throughout the last century, the comparison between Verdi and Wagner has been the object of constant, although not always consistent, scholarly attention, often influenced by vacillating intellectual and cultural trends. One of the first monographs on the subject is Gino Monaldi, Verdi e Wagner (Rome: Civelli, 1887). See also Antonio Grassi, Bellini, Wagner, Verdi (1801–1901) (Milan: Casa editrice “Erta,” 1935). A seminal book is Friedrich Lippman, ed., Colloquium “Verdi-Wagner”: Rom, 1969 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1972).  See also Hans Ehinger, Meister der Oper Gluck,

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Wagner, Verdi, Strauss: ihr Leben und Werk in kurzen Biographien (Basel: Amerbach, 1947); Hans Gàl, Brahms, Wagner, Verdi: dreiMeister, dreiWelten (Frankfurt am Main: S.  Fischer, 1975); and Ernő Lendvai, Verdi and Wagner (Budapest: International House, 1988). See also Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, eds.,  Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). A more recent study is Peter Parker, Verdi and/or Wagner: Two Men, Two Worlds, Two Centuries (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012). 48. I copialettere, 604: “May our scholars and politicians also boast the knowledge, the sciences, and even—may God forgive them— the arts of these winners [the German people]; but if they paid more attention, they would see that in their veins the ancient Gothic blood still flows, as they’re helplessly proud, hard, intolerant, scornful of all that is not Germanic, and possess a rapacity that has no limits. Rational men, without a heart; a strong race, but not a civil one.” In this letter from September 30, 1870, Verdi expresses his opinion on the Franco-Prussian war (July 19, 1870– May 10, 1871), a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. See also Massimo Mila, L’arte di Verdi (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 309. 49. “All’arte di Verdi, infine, Saba dev’essersi avvicinato, come alla Carmen di Bizet, anche per una ragione di contenuto: il grande realismo della ‘drammaturgia popolare-borghese’ di Verdi, con la sua adesione alla ‘realtà familiare dell’Ottocento,’ non dev’essere passato inosservato all’autore del Canzoniere, con i suoi drammatici conflitti quasi archetipici” (Finally, Saba must have approached the art of Verdi, as well as Bizet’s Carmen, for its content: the great realism of Verdi’s ‘bourgeois-popular dramaturgy,’ with its portrayal of ‘nineteenth-century family life,’ must not have gone unnoticed to the author of the Canzoniere, with its dramatic, almost archetypal conflicts). Cataldi, “Saba e Verdi,” 54. 50. Luigi Baldacci argues that the dynamic underlying Verdi’s librettos is a conflict between erotic desire and fatherly authority. Baldacci sees Verdi’s characters as representatives of an Old Testament religiosity, existing in a world dominated by a constant interchange between sky and earth. The father figure is seen as a God who enforces biblical law; the mother is a New Testament figure, but one always kept out of sight. Rigoletto perfectly illustrates Baldacci’s insight: the mother is absent and the father is the obstacle to the fulfillment of the love (and erotic desire) between the daughter and the Duke of Mantua. The end is tragic: paternal authority itself takes the life of the daughter. Luigi Baldacci, La musica in italiano: Libretti d’opera dell’Ottocento (Milan: Rizzoli, 1997), 62–90. 51. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 257: “My father had been the assassin to me/until I was twenty, when I met him.”

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52. Saba, Tutte le prose, 8: “Italians are not patricides. They are fratricides. Romulus and Remus, Ferruccio and Maramaldo, Mussolini and the Socialists, Badoglio and Graziani . . . Italians (I believe) are the only people whose history (and legends) are based on fratricide. And it is only with patricide (killing the old) that one can start a revolution. Italians want to devote themselves to their fathers and to receive from them, in exchange, permission to kill their brothers.” Trans. E. Gilson, 165–66. 53. In Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere, Saba acknowledges his own ambivalent attitude toward D’Annunzio’s poetry. See Saba, Tutte le prose, 128–29. In the later prose work mentioned at the outset of this chapter, “Della Biblioteca Civica ovvero della Gloria” (1957), Saba recalls the formative readings of his youth, among which we find D’Annunzio’s Poema paradisiaco (1893). See Saba, Tutte le prose, 1116–118. Furio Brugnolo (“Il Canzoniere di Umberto Saba,” in Letteratura italiana: Le opere, IV, Il Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 465–538) argues that D’Annunzio’s influence on Saba’s Canzoniere is first of all metrical (529), and contrasts his position with that of Mario Lavagetto, (La gallina di Saba [Turin: Einaudi, 1974], 23), who categorically denied D’Annunzio’s influence. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (Da D’Annunzio a Montale, 62n) points out crucial lexical influences of D’Annunzio’s poetry on “Trieste e una donna.” For other examinations of the Saba-D’Annunzio relationship, see Ettore Caccia, “Saba e D’Annunzio,” Quaderni Dannunziani 40–41 (1972): 165–90; and Giordano Castellani, “Nascita e divenire della poesia di Saba: ‘Soldato alla prigione’ 1908–1948,” Otto-Novecento 7 (1983): xvii-xx. 54. Saba considers the triad of Carducci, Pascoli, and D’Annunzio to represent a crucial step in the advancement of modern Italian literature. In a famous Scorciatoia Saba comments: “D’Annunzio è stato il più poeta della Triade. Alcuni suoi accenti sono indimenticabili; pochi, nati da un narcisismo totalitario. Ma quei pochi danno un suono d’oro sul marmo. Il resto—tutto il resto—è di una falsità sorprendente . . . Rimangono di lui, almeno, un verso e mezzo, che valgono tutto Carducci e tutto Pascoli” (D’Annunzio was the most talented poet of the Triad. Some of his accents are unforgettable; just a few are the product of a totalitarian narcissism. But those few sound like gold on marble. The rest—all the rest—is incredibly false . . . We are left with only a line and a half that is worth as much as Carducci and Pascoli combined). Saba, Tutte le prose, 864–65. 55. Saba, Tutte le prose, 491–496. 56. Saba recalls this episode also in “Autobiografia” 10 (8–10): “Gabriele d’Annunzio alla Versilia/vidi e conobbi; all’ospite fu assai/egli cortese, altro per me non fece” (In Versilia I saw and met/Gabriele D’Annunzio, all ­courtesy/to his guest, but otherwise no help to me). Saba, Tutte le poesie, 264. Trans. G. Hochfield, 273.

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57. Saba, Tutte le prose, 495. 58. Saba, Tutte le prose, 224. 59. “Il contrapposto è fra i due uomini nostri più compiutamente noti che meglio si prestano a dare un esempio pratico di quello che intendo per onestà e disonestà letteraria: è fra Alessandro Manzoni e Gabriele D’Annunzio: fra gli Inni Sacri e i cori dell’Adelchi, e il secondo libro delle Laudi e la Nave: fra versi mediocri ed immortali e magnifici versi per la più parte caduchi. L’onestà dell’uno e la nessuna onestà dell’altro, così verso loro stessi come verso il lettore . . . sono i due termini cui può benissimo ridursi la differenza dei due valori” (There is a contrast, which, if it seems artificial, nevertheless expresses my idea very well. The contrast is between two of our most famous men who best lend themselves as examples of what I consider literary honesty and dishonesty: it is between Alessandro Manzoni and Gabriele D’Annunzio, between the Inni sacri and the Cori dell’Adelchi, and the second book of the Laudi and La Nave, between mediocre but immortal verses and magnificent verses which are for the most part ephemeral. The honesty of the one and the lack of honesty of the other, both to themselves and to the reader. . . are the two terms to which the difference between the two values can very well be reduced) Saba. “Quello che resta da fare ai poeti,” Prose, 674. Trans. G. Hochfield, 525. 60. Saba, Tutte le prose, 31. 61. “Three vast rushes bent over him/terrible, with the weight/of eternal thoughts and pain:/Dante Alighieri, who supported the world/with his hands and the sources/of the universal life held in his heart;/Leonardo, master of the truth,/king of the dark domains,/who fixed his eyes into the rays of the unknown Sun;/the ironclad Buonarroti,/who breathed his great disdain/into hard rocks/immortalizing the imperishable children,/ the heroic, silent rebels/and overcame their mortal Destiny.”  Gabriele D’Annunzio, “Per la morte di Giuseppe Verdi,” Versi d’amore e di gloria II (Milan: Mondadori, 1984), 435. Guarnieri Corazzol, commenting on this poem, gives an account of the motivations behind its composition and its value in D’Annunzio’s oeuvre. She considers the poem, with its easy rhetoric, among D’Annunzio’s least inspired, and she interprets this work as a classical celebration, written on commission. Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, Tristano, mio Tristano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988), 28. See also Eurialo De Michelis, “D’Annunzio e le arti,” D’Annunzio a contraggenio (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1963), 217. 62. Saba, Tutte le prose, 494. 63. “But what moved me the most was an anonymous note, which I received yesterday and in which was typed the verse that D’Annunzio wrote in honor of Giuseppe Verdi’s death: ‘He cried and loved for everyone.’ I

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consider this line one of my greatest literary achievements.” Umberto Saba, Atroce paese che amo (Milan: Bompiani, 1987), 5. 64. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 532. 65. “I due più bei versi della letteratura italiana sono per me in questo momento: ‘La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante’ e ‘L’uno buggera l’altro’. Il primo lo conoscevo da un pezzo. Il secondo l’ho letto per la prima volta uno di questi giorni di fine guerra nel libro di Paolo Monelli ROMA 1943—bellissimo libro davvero, vivo; una sorpresa, una meraviglia!—che egli cita per dire che in quell’anno (1943) i romani, come al tempo del Belli, provavano qualche difficoltà a campare senza buggerarsi a vicenda” (The most beautiful lines in Italian literature to me now are: “Trembling, he kissed my mouth” and “They will swindle each other, Your Holiness.” I’ve known the first one for a long time. I came across the second at the end of the war in a book called Roma 1943 by Paolo Monelli—a really wonderful, vivid book: a surprise, a marvel, in which he uses the line to show that in 1943 as in the time of Belli, Romans had a hard time getting through life without swindling each other). Saba, Tutte le prose, 51. Trans. E. Gilson, 190. 66. Francesco Maria Piave, Ernani, I.2: “Ernani: Mercè, diletti amici;/o tanto amor, mercè . ../Udite or tutti del mio cor gli affanni;/e se voi negherete il vostro aiuto,/forse per sempre Ernani fia perduto.” Opera libretto for Giuseppe Verdi, Ernani (1844), http://opera.stanford.edu/Verdi/ Ernani/libretto.html. Italics mine. 67. The line is “Udite or tutti del mio cor gli affanni.” See previous note. 68. “Questo italianissimo verso, che canta il partigiano-tenore Ernani, appena compare sulla scena, e nel quale vedo come lo spiegarsi al sole della bandiera nazionale” (This most Italian line of poetry sung by the partisan-­tenor Ernani the moment he steps on stage, and which, in my view stands for our flag flying in the sun). Saba, Tutte le prose, 99. Trans. E. Gilson, 211. 69. Saba, Tutte le prose, 25–26. 70. Saba, Tutte le prose, 47: “I am not a nationalist. And I have no interest in throwing oil on the fire, but I know that we are placed, even more than is really necessary, on the side of evil. But if the things I’ve mentioned— poetry, paintings, novels—still have any weight, they belong—without counterparts—on our side of the scale.” Trans. E. Gilson, 187–88.

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References Primary Sources D’Annunzio, Gabriele. 1982. Versi d’amore e di gloria, ed. Luciano Anceschi, Annamaria Andreoli, and Niva Lorenzini. Milan: Mondadori. Saba, Umberto.1964. Prose, ed. Linuccia Saba. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. ———. 1981. Coi miei occhi, ed. Claudio Milanini. Milan: Il Saggiatore. ———.1983. La Spada d’Amore: Lettere Scelte 1902–1957, ed. Aldo Marcovecchio. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. ———. 1987. Atroce paese che amo. Lettere famigliari (1945–1953), ed. Gianfranca Lavezzi and Rossana Saccani. Milan: Bompiani. ———. 1988. Tutte le poesie, ed. Arrigo Stara. Milan: Mondadori. ———.1989. Il letterato Vincenzo: Dramma inedito, ed. Rosanna Saccani. Lecce: Piero Manni. ———. 1998. History and Chronicle of the Songbook. Trans. Stephen Sartarelli. Riverdale-on-Hudson: Sheep Meadow. ———. 2001. Tutte le prose, ed. Arrigo Stara. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2004. Quante rose a nascondere un abisso: Carteggio con la moglie (1905–1956), ed. Raffaella Acetoso. Lecce: Manni. ———. 2008. Songbook. The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba. Trans. George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan. New Haven: Yale University Press. Saba, Umberto, and Pierantonio Quarantotti Gambini. 1965. Il vecchio e il giovane. Carteggio 1930–1957, ed. Linuccia Saba. Milan: Mondadori. Verdi, Giuseppe. 1913. I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, eds. Gaetano Cesari, Alessandro Luzio, and Michele Scherillo. Milan: Tipografia Stucchi Ceretti & Co. ———. 2000a. Lettere. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2000b. Libretti. Milan: Mondadori. Weaver, William. 1963. Verdi Librettos. Garden City: Anchor Books.

Secondary Sources Abbate, Carolyn, and Roger Parker, eds. 1989. Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baldacci, Luigi. 1997. La musica in italiano: Libretti d’opera dell’Ottocento. Milan: Rizzoli. Baldi, Nora. 1958. Il paradiso di Saba. Milan: Mondadori. Baldini, Gabriele. 2001. Abitare la battaglia: La storia di Giuseppe Verdi. Milan: Garzanti.

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Baldoni, Luca. 2005. Un vecchio amava un ragazzo: Homoeroticism in Umberto Saba’s Late Poetry (1935–1948). Italian Studies 2: 221–239. ———. 2006. ‘L’uccello alto nella notte’: corpo e spazio omoerotico nella poesia italiana del Novecento. The Italianist 1: 92–113. Brugnolo, Furio. 1995. Il Canzoniere di Umberto Saba. In Letteratura italiana: Le opere, IV: Il Novecento, 465–538. Turin: Einaudi. Caccia, Ettore. 1972. Saba e D’Annunzio. Quaderni Dannunziani XL-XLI: 165–190. Carrai, Stefano. 2017. Saba. Rome: Salerno Editrice. Castellani, Giordano. 1983. Nascita e divenire della poesia di Saba: «Soldato alla prigione» 1908–1948. Otto-Novecento VII: xvii–xx. Cataldi, Piero. 1985. Saba e Verdi. L’ombra d’Argo 5–6: 45–55. Contini, Gianfranco. 1946. Un anno di letteratura. Florence: Le Monnier. De Michelis, Eurialo. 1963. D’Annunzio e le arti. In D’Annunzio a contraggenio. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo. Debenedetti, Giacomo. 1958. Ultime cose su Saba. Nuovi argomenti 30: 1–19. ———. 1975. Poesia italiana del Novecento: Quaderni inediti. Milan: Garzanti. ———. 1982. Saggi, ed. Franco Contorbia. Milan: Mondadori. Ehinger, Hans. 1947. Meister der Oper Gluck, Wagner, Verdi, Strauß: ihr Leben und Werk in kurzen Biographien. Basel: Amerbach. Elia, Enrico. 1922. Scritti di Enrico Elia. Milan: Caddeo. Fornari, Franco. 1985. Carmen adorata: Psicanalisi della donna demoniaca. Milan: Longanesi. Frassica, Pietro. 2008. Gli ‘alleati’ di Saba. Rivista di letteratura italiana 1: 55–63. Gàl, Hans. 1975. Brahms, Wagner, Verdi: drei Meister, drei Welten. Frankfurt: S. Fischer. Gavazzeni, Gianandrea. 1968. Fra poesia e musica. Nuova rivista musicale 2: 1089–1091. Grassi, Antonio. 1935. Bellini, Wagner, Verdi (1801–1901). Milan: Casa editrice “Erta”. Graziani, Carlo, ed. 1941. Giuseppe Verdi: Autobiografia dalle lettere. Milan: Mondadori. Guarnieri Corazzol, Adriana. 1988. Tristano, mio Tristano. Gli scrittori italiani e il caso Wagner. Bologna: il Mulino. Jattoni, Massimiliano. 2004. ‘Gli umani amori’: La tematica omoerotica nell’opera di Umberto Saba. Rivista di letteratura italiana 1: 31–46. Lavagetto, Mario. 1974. La gallina di Saba. Turin: Einaudi. Lendvai, Ernő. 1988. Verdi and Wagner. Budapest: International House. Lippmann, Friedrich, ed. 1972. Colloquium “Verdi-Wagner,” Rom, 1969. Köln: Böhlau Verlag. Lonardi, Gilberto. 2003. Il fiore dell’addio: Leonora, Manrico e altri fantasmi del melodramma nella poesia di Montale. Bologna: Il Mulino.

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Martin, George. 1988. Aspects of Verdi. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. 1975. Tradizione del Novecento: da D’Annunzio a Montale. Milan: Feltrinelli. Mila, Massimo. 1980. L’arte di Verdi. Turin: Einaudi. ———. 2000. Verdi. Milan: Rizzoli. Monaldi, Gino. 1887. Verdi e Wagner. Rome: Civelli. Parker, Peter. 2012. Verdi and/or Wagner. Two Men, Two Worlds, Two Centuries. London: Thames & Hudson. Sanguineti, Edoardo. 1987. La missione del critico. Genoa: Marinetti. Smart, Mary Ann. 2001. Liberty On (and Off) the Barricades: Verdi’s Risorgimento Fantasies. In Making and Remaking Italy: The Formation of Cultural Identity Around the Risorgimento, ed. Albert Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg, 103–118. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2004. Verdi, Italian Romanticism, and the Risorgimento. In Cambridge Companion to Verdi, ed. Scott Balthazar, 29–45. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Tordi, Rosita, ed. 1986. Umberto Saba, Trieste e la cultura mitteleuropea: Atti del convegno, Roma, 29 e 30 marzo 1984. Milan: Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori. Proceedings.

CHAPTER 4

More Than Words: Ossi di seppia, Opera, and the Miracle of Counter-Eloquence

4.1   Montale the Baritone When Eugenio Montale attended his first opera at the “Politeama” theater in Genoa as a young boy, the work being performed was Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula (1831), a masterpiece of Italian bel canto. The poet later joked that he was able to see only the first two acts because his father was in a hurry to go home for dinner. But even that truncated performance left a deep imprint on his imagination—Montale’s memory of that day contained all the elements of his relationship with opera as an adult and an artist, his consuming passion for certain works and the sense of wonder and excitement that opera came to represent in his poetry: La prima opera in musica da me ascoltata fu la Sonnambula, in un teatro in cui tra un atto e l’altro si bevevano gazose col pallino. Non saprei in quale anno, certo nel primo lustro del nostro secolo. Di quell’esecuzione ricordo tutto, anche i nomi dei principali artisti . . . Affondato in un cuscino preso a nolo passai due ore d’estasi, interrotte però dalla decisione di mio padre: il quale sentenziò, alla fine del secondo atto, che si faceva tardi e occorreva rincasare d’urgenza per la cena . . . Fu per me un dolore cocente.1

In an essay entitled “Montale o l’uomo musico” (“Montale, or the Musical Man”) novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893–1973) captures the urgency behind Montale’s musical obsession, as well as its deep roots: he

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recounts a story of Montale and his brothers as young boys in their summer retreat, dressed up in robes as they performed arias from Verdi’s La traviata and Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia.2 But Montale also dreamed of trading this imaginary stage in Monterosso for the glamour of a real theater. Between 1921 and 1927, he famously took private lessons with Ernesto Sivori (1853–1923), a world-renowned baritone. Montale would revisit his apprenticeship with Sivori in a short story entitled “In chiave di fa” (“In the key of F”), an affectionate portrayal of his struggle to meet his master’s expectations.3 When Sivori died, Montale’s professional ambitions came to a sudden halt, but as I will show, he never lost his passion for music. Throughout Montale’s life, opera would be a source of inspiration and a cornerstone of his intellectual development. As an adolescent, he kept returning to the Politeama with friends, as he depicts in the short story “Il successo.”4 As an adult, Montale began working as a librettist and translator of librettos, though this aspect of his creative production never attracted significant critical attention.5 He became a more regular attendee of opera houses later in life, when, as music editor of the Corriere dell’Informazione, he wrote a popular series of concert reviews.6 These writings provide valuable insight into Montale’s musical sensibility as well as his ideas on music. Just as importantly, they serve to demonstrate the scope of his familiarity with opera, his encyclopedic knowledge of works and composers. The reviews would later be collected in the volume Prime alla scala (1981), and together they form a narrative arc that can be read (as Mengaldo has argued) as an integral part of Montale’s creative production.7 In his short story “La piuma di struzzo”—one of several works of fiction he wrote about opera—two famous singers, Gaudio Mansueto and Astorre Pinti, pay an imaginary visit to the poet. They appear before him dressed as operatic characters—Mansueto as Marcello from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836) and Pinti as Alcindoro from Puccini’s La Bohème (1900). They knock on his door at night, just before bedtime. The poet is astounded: while they respond to his baffled questions, they sit at a piano and improvise arias from Verdi’s La forza del destino and Gounod’s Faust. When they finally leave, Montale ponders the meaning of their visit, eventually coming to realize that the two characters symbolize the beginning and the end of his love for opera. While Mansueto was the first singer Montale idolized and tried to imitate after hearing him, Pinti’s Alcindoro

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was the last operatic role he fantasized about performing before giving up his dream of a career as a singer.8 At the end of “La piuma di struzzo,” Montale wakes up in the morning with only a vague recollection of meeting the two singers the previous night. He begins to question the truth of his memory of their appearance, but then his maid shows him an ostrich feather she found behind the piano, part of Marcello’s costume. This memento surely points to the meaning of Montale’s story: for him and countless others, operatic singers and characters were larger than life, not simply elements of a story but presences, persistent features of his consciousness that always remained present in some form. Opera, furthermore, does not appear only in human form in Montale’s works. As I will show in this chapter, opera finds a far subtler role in his poems in the form of textual references. These references will tell us more about what opera meant to Montale than Mansueto and Pinti could. I will begin by looking at Montale’s book of poetry, L’opera in versi (1980). The operatic echoes that fill L’opera in versi have only recently been the object of scholarly examination. This scholarship, furthermore, has on the whole been inconclusive, largely because it mistakenly takes Montale’s opera thematics to be passing and superficial, a matter of occasional citation, on par with the example of Palazzeschi we saw in the introduction. In the next few paragraphs I will summarize this incomplete scholarship, as well as focus on some of the better contributions. I will then go on to argue that Montale’s references to opera go far beyond casual allusion, that they are central to his stylistic vocabulary and connect him to the issues we have seen with D’Annunzio and Saba: the perception of a historical impasse for poetry, an innate and often tortured yearning to surpass his predecessors, a search for a means to reconnect artistically with the Zeitgeist, and the discovery of a strong but not unproblematic answer in opera. Although Mengaldo identified the Verdian echoes in Montale’s early poems in 1971, he failed to accurately assess the scope of the poet’s operatic influence, dismissing these Verdian traces as happenstance reminiscences, not indicative of any broader theme in Montale’s poetry9 Gavazzeni followed up on Mengaldo’s analysis, but expanded the scope of the discussion, laying the groundwork for future critical inquiries.10 In his monograph, Mario Aversano took up Gavazzeni’s suggestion, offering an intertextual analysis of the influence of opera librettos on Montale’s poetry and tracking the operatic references throughout his body of work.11

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Aversano challenged Mengaldo’s conservative conclusions, arguing instead that in Montale’s poetry there is a methodical pattern of allusion to opera librettos. Aversano saw these allusions (which Mengaldo dismissed as remnants of Montale’s musical education) as indicative of a privileging of operas as outright artistic predecessors. But Aversano’s scope was admittedly limited, looking only to identify operatic sources in Montale’s poems and rarely delving deeper into their function. In 1996, on the occasion of Montale’s centennial, Stefano Verdino and Roberto Iovino edited a collection of essays—by musicologists, literary scholars, and journalists—that show the scope and complexity of Montale’s interest in music.12 In this collection, Gavazzeni remembers Montale’s years of apprenticeship as a singer, underscoring the importance of music for the poet’s personal and intellectual growth, while Margherita Dalmati highlights the ways in which Montale’s poems aspire to a musical dimension, examining how his style evokes musical rhythm and intervals. Iovino reflects on Montale’s experience as a music critic, concurring with Aversano’s conclusions on the poet’s favoring of Verdi and Puccini. Iovino argues that Montale’s taste as a music critic was very conservative: he was fascinated by the trite themes of Italian opera, the popular tone of Verdi’s works and their ability to reach a wide public, and he was suspicious of all forms of elitism. This conservative position is in concert with the anti-­ intellectualism of Montale’s early poems. Verdino focuses instead on Montale’s ambition to create a more musical form of poetry, casting the operatic allusions in his poems as attempts to compensate for his lost musical career. The most attentive student of Montale’s relationship with opera is Gilberto Lonardi, whose Il fiore dell’addio (2003) analyzes the role of operatic references in the development of Montale’s poetry.13 With Lonardi, the scholarly understanding of Montale’s opera thematics takes a significant leap forward. Unlike scholars before him, Lonardi delves into the role of opera in the lifelong arc of Montale’s introspection. In particular, Lonardi shows how Montale’s musical ambition is part of the poet’s larger desire to penetrate and comprehend what he perceived as the “secret organization” of the phenomenal world, a central philosophical theme of his earlier poems. Throughout this chapter I will expand on Lonardi’s idea, exploring the influence of opera on Montale’s early production by focusing in particular on Ossi di seppia (1925). Montale spoke about the musicality of his poetry with an air of antagonism toward his predecessors: in a famous interview with Giorgio Zampa,

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he claimed to have been the most musical poet of his generation, setting himself above Pascoli and D’Annunzio. In Ossi di seppia, allusions to opera librettos are employed as part of an effort to surpass the stylistic influence of the previous generation of poets. These allusions, however, present a theoretical conundrum: while Montale claims to be seeking a more musical form of expression, his poetry’s relationship to opera seems predominantly textual, at times more a relationship to librettos than to the operas themselves. But Montale was aware of this apparent contradiction, and this textual debt had a purpose. In 1946, looking back at the genesis of Ossi di seppia, Montale openly stated his ambition to challenge the magniloquence of the previous generation of poets with a language of “counter-­eloquence” (“All’eloquenza della nostra vecchia lingua aulica volevo torcere il collo, magari a rischio di una controeloquenza”).14 My argument here will be that Montale found this “counter-eloquence” in the widely popular lines of opera librettos.

4.2   Echoes of Opera Montale’s early musical education with Sivori undoubtedly shaped Ossi di seppia (1925), contributing both to this first book’s theoretical framework and to its preponderance of citations of opera librettos and allusions to famous opera plots and scenes. These references appear in three types: the imitation of rhetorical strategies typical of musical theater; the open quotation of single lines and whole passages from opera librettos; and the evocation of operatic characters, situations, and images. “I limoni” offers an excellent illustration of Montale’s interweaving of these types of references. First published in 1921, “I limoni” is considered a manifesto of Montale’s early poetics. With the title itself, the poet announces his desire to distance himself from the aforementioned rhetorical magniloquence that characterized the previous generation of poets, in particular D’Annunzio, whose presence haunts most of Ossi di seppia’s pages.15 In Montale’s efforts to move beyond such predecessors, the lemon tree symbolizes the humility he espouses, leaving more sophisticated plants for those celebrated names of the past: Ascoltami, i poeti laureati si muovono soltanto fra le piante dai nomi poco usati: bossi ligustri o acanti. (“I limoni,” 1–3)16

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The opening line—“Ascoltami”—seems at first to channel D’Annunzio’s “La pioggia nel pineto” (1902, from the collection Alcyone), in which the imperative “Ascolta” (“Listen”) recurs throughout as a refrain. But Aversano reminds us that the imperative “ascolta,” (which appears elsewhere in Ossi di seppia17), as well as other forms of the verb “ascoltare,” appear frequently in famous opera scenes. Aversano singles out two examples: the prologue to Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci and the aria “Donde lieta uscì” from Puccini’s La bohème.18 Ascolta, ascolta. Le poche robe aduna che lasciai sparse. Nel mio cassetto stan chiusi quel cerchietto d’or e il libro di preghiere. Involgi tutto quanto in un grembiale e manderò il portiere… (La bohème, III)19

Lonardi concurs with Aversano’s insight, recognizing the imperative “Ascoltami” as an important operatic topos. The specifics of Puccini’s aria tell us more about Montale’s intent in echoing this topos. In this scene, after a fight with the poet Rodolfo over his jealousy, the seamstress Mimì announces her plan to pack all her belongings and leave the apartment she shares with her lover. Luca Carlo Rossi suggests that Montale identified with the character of Rodolfo, both of them aspiring poets working temporary jobs at newspapers, both struggling and in search of an artistic identity.20 Furthermore, D’Annunzio allegedly detested this iconic scene, giving Montale the opportunity to defy the elder poet by quoting Puccini. Montale repeatedly draws on what Lonardi calls “attacchi operistici.” In music, an attacco is a brief opening theme that is subsequently repeated and developed. Lonardi points to an example in Montale’s “Mia vita a te non chiedo,” which references Puccini’s Tosca (1900; libretto by Illica and Giacosa), a political opera set during the early stages of Italy’s nineteenth-­ century struggle for independence: Mia vita, a te non chiedo lineamenti fissi, volti plausibili o possessi. Nel tuo giro inquieto ormai lo stesso sapore han miele e assenzio. (“Mia vita a te non chiedo,” 1–4)21

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The poem’s first words—“Mia vita”—as well as the adjective “inquieto” echo this passage from Act I of Tosca: CAVARADOSSI Mia vita, amante inquieta, dirò sempre, “Floria, t’amo!” Ah! L’alma acquieta, sempre “t’amo!” ti dirò! (Tosca, I)22

The first stanza of “I limoni” offers yet another example: Le viuzze che seguono i ciglioni, discendono tra i ciuffi delle canne e mettono negli orti, tra gli alberi dei limoni. (“I limoni,” 8–10)23

Several commentators have noted how the line “mettono negli orti” (“[the paths that] . . . lead into the orchards”) alludes to another moment in Tosca’s first act: in the Roman church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, the painter Cavaradossi is trying to assist Angelotti, a conspirator against the occupying French army. Angelotti has just escaped the Papal prison of Castel Sant’Angelo, and the painter shows the fugitive a way out of the convent through the chapel’s courtyard: La cappella mette a un orto mal chiuso, poi c’è un canneto che va lungi pei campi a una mia villa. (Tosca, I.6)24

Not only does Cavaradossi’s “La cappella mette a un orto malchiuso” reappear in “I limoni,” but the adjective “malchiuso” (“poorly-closed,” here referring to the orchard) likewise reappears in the “malchiuso portone” of “I limoni.”25 These allusions bring us back to that important Montalian theme mentioned earlier—the secret order of nature, surrounded by a gate, but one “poorly-closed” and thus offering glimpses within. In other passages of Montale’s early poems, references to lesser-known operatic moments likewise appear. In “Upupa, ilare uccello calunniato,” for example, Montale cites Verdi’s Il trovatore (1853, libretto by Salvadore Cammarano), one of Montale’s favorite operas and one of the most frequently quoted in his poems:

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Come tutto di fuori si protende al muover del tuo capo, aligero folletto, e tu lo ignori. (“Upupa, ilare uccello calunniato,” 8–10)26

The hemistich “e tu lo ignori” (“and you ignore it”) quotes the opera’s second act, where the tenor Manrico asks his step-mother Azucena to recount the “funesta storia” of his arch-rival, the Count of Luna, who is secretly his brother: MANRICO (sorgendo) Soli or siamo; deh, narra questa storia funesta. AZUCENA E tu la ignori, tu pur! Ma, giovinetto, i passi tuoi d’ambizion lo sprone lungi traea!… (Il trovatore, II.1)27

These examples showcase how opera librettos feed Montale’s poetic imagination, revealing a dynamic of citation and allusion, but also occasional subversion and rhetorical repurposing. In some cases, Montale evokes opera with layers of ambiguity, as in “I limoni”’s echo of La bohème’s “Ascolta,” (with its added significance of slighting D’Annunzio by quoting an opera he disliked). Cases like this are as much allusions as they are provocations, statements on Montale’s dissatisfaction with his poetic model and his decision to turn instead to Verdi, Puccini, Leoncavallo, and others. A key example of this antecedent may be found in one of Montale’s most anthologized and revered poems, “Meriggiare pallido e assorto,” yet another manifesto of his early poetics: Meriggiare pallido e assorto Presso un rovente muro d’orto, ascoltare tra i pruni e gli sterpi schiocchi di merli, frusci di serpi. (“Meriggiare pallido e assorto,” 1–4)28

In this opening the primacy of sound is announced by the verb “ascoltare,” and then enacted through a series of assonances, imposing a strident musicality: “PRU-ni,” “STER-pi,” “MER-li,” and “SER-pi.” We have already

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seen the operatic resonances of “ascoltare,” but the operatic undertones of this poem begin with its very first word, “meriggiare.” This verb is derived from the Latin “meridiare,” meaning “to rest at noon.” Contini points to the moment of noontime (“meriggio”) as a central topos in Ossi di seppia, representing a suspension from the flow of time, a moment of pause that can lead to insight and epiphany.29 With “meriggiare,” Montale is in part evoking previous poets—the term is used by Gozzano and Boine, as well as by Montale’s principal antagonist in this period, D’Annunzio.30 But the verb also contains a strong echo of Verdi’s Shakespearean masterpiece, Otello (1887).31 In the opera’s second act, Cassio asks Jago how he might find a way to speak to Desdemona, Otello’s wife. Jago suggests meeting her at midday, noting her habit of strolling at noon in the company of his own wife, Emilia: È suo costume girsene a meriggiar fra quelle fronde colla consorte mia. Quivi l’aspetta. (Otello, II)32

Although previous poets—D’Annunzio especially—are meant to be heard in Montale’s “meriggiare,” the operatic layer of the term is especially strong, as Montale also repeats the “fronde”33 from Verdi’s scene. This operatic layer, in other words, is meant to outstrip the literary layer, to overtake Montale’s predecessors. Luca Carlo Rossi has mapped out operatic references scattered throughout L’opera in versi, marking a distinction between the more overt references to opera that characterize Montale’s later Satura (1971) and the subtler allusions from works like the early Ossi di seppia.34 Invaluable though Rossi’s work is, in general, like many other scholars, he concludes that in Ossi di seppia Montale’s operatic references are haphazard, the product only of spontaneous recollection, lacking any larger design or theoretical program. In the following pages, however, I will argue that a much more deliberate design is discernible. Although Montale’s operatic vocabulary was very broad, reflecting his knowledge of the history of music (as witnessed by his Prime alla scala as well as Rossi’s tally of allusions), it is nonetheless easy to identify certain figures who recur with greater frequency and prominence than others. Despite his considerable knowledge of minor composers and librettists, as well as his penchant for lesser known moments in otherwise canonical

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operas, Montale shows a clear preference for the Golden Age of Italian opera, that tradition that extends from Rossini to Mascagni, through Donizetti, Verdi, and Puccini. In his critical writings Montale voices his dislike for Mahler, Wagner, and the avant-garde experimentalism of the twentieth century, in particular 12-tone serialism (or “dodecafonia”). These conservative tastes show through in the operatic allusions of his poems. As with Saba, the most prominent operatic influence on Montale was arguably Verdi, whose repertoire Montale regularly drew from and whose influence became even more marked in the poet’s later collections (as I will show). Montale also admired the work of Arrigo Boito, both as a librettist and as a composer: Boito’s Mefistofele (1868) looms large in the background of several of Montale’s poems. Above all, however, it was Puccini who had the strongest impact on Montale’s imagery in Ossi di seppia.35 I have set the stage for this with the “ascolta” of “I limoni” (and its echo of La bohème), but Montale’s debt to Puccini goes much deeper.36 Puccini was undeniably one of the most popular composers of his time, and his works remain staples of operatic repertoires around the globe. Even beyond the music world, the composer had an enduring impact on the collective consciousness of the twentieth century.37 He was the clear heir to Verdi’s artistic legacy, but also unique in his own right: Puccini’s experimentations with form and his challenges to the tradition of historical and mythological subjects for opera (favoring instead the drama of everyday human life or the exoticism of foreign cultures) positively revolutionized Italian opera. To all this, Montale paid close attention. Among Puccini’s operas, the one that left the deepest impression on Montale was La bohème. This work was first performed in 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Turin, with a libretto by Luigi Illica (1857–1919) and Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906). The two adapted the collection of stories Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851), by the French author Henry Murger (1822–1861), under the strict supervision of Puccini himself.38 The opera portrays the bohemian lives of four penniless artists in the Latin Quarter of 1830s Paris. When it premiered, La Bohème was a novelty for Italian audiences, with its emphasis on the directionless daily existence of its protagonists. While focusing on the canonical themes of Italian opera—love and death—it presented them in a decidedly humble frame. Montale was struck in particular by La bohème’s dialectic contrast of high and low stylistic registers: the poet reveled in the language used by librettists Giacosa and Illica (who also wrote other of Puccini’s most

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celebrated masterpieces, including Tosca and Madama Butterfly).39 The two chose for the opera’s epigraph a quote from Murger that summarizes La bohème’s linguistic innovation: the French writer describes the vocabulary of this work as the “hell of rhetoric” and the “paradise of neologism.”40 Clearly, the spirit of this quote resonated with Montale’s desire for a renewed poetic language. Montale repeatedly acknowledged the greatness of La Bohème in his non-fictional writings, citing first and foremost Puccini’s use of melody, which becomes intertwined with the dramatic development and contributes to the construction of the work’s characters.41 Moreover, as Lonardi points out, Puccini’s operas present a mixture of the sublime and the trivial, a contrast that resonated with Montale’s frequent use of the oxymoron in Ossi di seppia.42 These key characteristics are not limited to Puccini’s opera alone, but are also features of other operas in the verismo movement, one of the most influential trends for Montale, in particular during the early stages of his poetry.43 The label verismo usually designates a brief phase of Italian opera that broke with the preceding operatic traditions regarding story settings, choice of subjects and characters, and dramatic structure. The themes and subjects of operatic verismo were inspired by its literary counterpart, initiated by the Sicilian author Giovanni Verga (1840–1922) and his contemporary Luigi Capuana (1839–1915), theoretician of the movement. Literary verismo—in part inspired by French naturalism—aspired to a newly objective approach to literature, emphasizing regional characteristics and everyday dramas and conflicts. Its operatic counterpart maintains these characteristics, in particular the realistic portrayal of the lower classes, whose social dynamics become case studies of universal human passions. Formally, all this equated to shorter operas, often one-acts, with a focus on the daily struggles of peasants. As already pointed, the founder of operatic verismo is generally considered to be Mascagni, whose revolutionary one-act Cavalleria rusticana outlined, to a large extent, the stylistic blueprint for the genre. Mascagni adapted Verga’s homonymous novella, which focused on the gritty and violent lives of Sicilian peasants. The opera met with both critical praise and popular acclaim, and dozens of imitations were soon staged. The core group of Italian composers dedicated to verismo is often called “La giovane scuola.” This group included such prominent composers as Puccini himself, Leoncavallo, Franchetti, and again Mascagni. Despite its initial appeal, however, verismo eventually lost its air of urgency and its acolytes began seeking to shake off the verista label. Nonetheless, certain key veristi works

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remain cornerstones of opera houses worldwide. Mascagni’s short masterpiece is usually performed alongside another key verista work: Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci, a meditation on jealousy, revenge, and death, and another opera that had an impact on Montale’s imagination, leaving scattered but meaningful traces throughout his oeuvre.44 Montale’s fondness for verismo also had biographical elements: the first opera that Montale ever reviewed as a journalist was Leoncavallo’s Goffredo Mameli (for Genoa’s newspaper Il piccolo, April 28, 1916). The opera was Leoncavallo’s contribution to the debate between interventionists and non-interventionists during World War I, thus aspiring to the political stature acquired by Verdi during the process of Italian unification.45 For Montale, the review of the opera was in fact his public debut as a writer.46 In it, he underscores the Italian melodic quality of the music, which he juxtaposes to Wagnerian experimentations, foreshadowing the conservative approach that will characterize his later music criticism. But the poet’s biographical connections to verismo go further. In reviewing Iris by Mascagni in 1957, Montale describes his early infatuation with its libretto, which he considered “a miracle of poetry.”47 While investigating the broader impact of this libretto on Montale, Rosita Tordi examines in particular its presence in Montale’s character “Clizia,” central to Le occasioni and later books.48 Montale’s adoration of Iris reveals the broader parameters of his definition of verismo—although his review groups the opera with other verista works, praising its dramatic consistency and use of common language, Iris is ostensibly not a conventional verista work; set in Japan in quasi-mythical times, it is usually regarded as a Symbolist opera. Montale’s slippage on the criteria of verismo is not incidental: while showing a clear predilection for the composers of this genre—both as a music critic and as a poet—he was not fond of the label “verismo musicale” and never acknowledged either Mascagni or Puccini as veristi.49 Montale saw verismo as a form of artistic avant-garde, and thus a continuation of the great operatic tradition of the Italian Ottocento (as one can confirm, for instance, in his review of Pagliacci).50 His preference for Puccini, Mascagni, and Leoncavallo in this phase is indicative of an evolving intellectual design. Common aesthetic affinities exist between Montale and these composers, who share with the poet a will to break from the tradition that preceded them through an aesthetics of counter-eloquence: the search for a language that adheres more closely to lived reality.

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4.3   More Than Words In “Intenzioni (Intervista Immaginaria),” Montale states that when he wrote his first book he was “obey[ing] a need for musical expression.”51 This need was dictated by his intellectual goal of creating a poetic language that expressed the deeper reality of things that other poets failed to capture, as though they were separated from this reality by a veil: Volevo che la mia parola fosse più aderente di quella degli altri poeti che avevo conosciuto. Più aderente a che? Mi pareva di vivere sotto una campana di vetro, eppure sentivo di essere vicino a qualcosa di essenziale. Un velo sottile, un filo appena mi separava dal quid definitivo. L’espressione assoluta sarebbe stata la rottura di quel velo, di quel filo: un’esplosione, la fine del mondo come rappresentazione . . . la mia volontà di aderenza restava musicale, istintiva, non programmatica.52

When Montale describes the world as “representation,” he is echoing Schopenhauer’s idea of the world as manifestation of the Will. Schopenhauer’s influence on Montale has already been documented, but one crucial aspect of this influence has been largely overlooked: music as the key to the true reality beneath the world’s superficial appearance.53 For Schopenhauer, it is through art that humans can see the truth that the world of phenomena is a construct of the human will. This fact is the source of ongoing suffering in human life, and it is only art that makes things tolerable, that provides real consolation. In The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer dedicates most of the third book (and its supplement) to aesthetics and to the classification of the various fine arts. He organizes them into a hierarchy that corresponds to their different degrees of proximity to the Will, and it is music that occupies the highest position. While the other arts are part of the world’s phenomenal representation of the Will, music is a direct emanation of it. Through music, in other words, it becomes possible to gain an unmediated access to the Will. This process, however, is not a rational one: the truth of music is impossible to articulate through language, for the same reason that the original act of the Will’s objectification is inexpressible.54 Through the lens of Schopenhauer, one can better understand the intellectual convictions behind Montale’s fixation on music: while he claims to be seeking a more musical poetics in order to surpass his predecessors, this ambition stems from a belief that he can create a poetry that

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shares music’s status as a “direct emanation” of the Will. This goal is not uncomplicated—as one of the lesser forms of art in Schopenhauer’s hierarchy, poetry is bound by semantic limitations and is in and of itself merely another “representation” of the Will. But it is through this idea that Montale’s dissatisfaction with the poetry of his predecessors becomes a guiding light—although their poetry possessed musicality, Montale found it to be an empty, mannerist musicality (in particular that of D’Annunzio). He thus sought to go beyond these models by establishing a connection to music that could elevate poetry to overcome language’s semantic limits and in so doing capture the lived world more fully. In Quaderno genovese (1983), Montale discusses his philosophical apprenticeship, citing as inspirations the work of Émile Boutroux (1845–1921) on contingency, the early continental philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), as well as Schopenhauer and Lev Shestov (1866–1938).55 Lonardi, in his examination of Montale’s intellectual influences, focuses in particular on the role of Shestov, a Russian existentialist philosopher.56 Shestov would influence Montale most by sharpening the poet’s idea of reality as “just beneath the surface,” a secret order underlying the material world. Lonardi refers to Shestov as the “philosopher of miracle,” in that for him the true meaning of the universe is revealed miraculously in the most trivial, ordinary situations. Despite their transitory nature, the small events of daily life become vehicles of revelation for Montale too, clues to the true nature of things. Montale speaks of his intellectual debt to Shestov in Ossi di seppia: Direttamente io conosco pochi testi dell’esistenzialismo, ma lessi molto tempo fa qualche scrittore come Shestov, un kierkegaardiano molto vicino alle posizioni di questa filosofia . . . Il miracolo era per me evidente come la necessità. Immanenza e trascendenza non sono separabili, e farsi uno stato d’animo nella perenne mediazione nei due termini, come propone il moderno storicismo, non risolve il problema o lo risolve con un ottimismo di parata.57

The “miracle” is a central theme in Montale’s early poetry—the miracle represents a point of contact between transcendence and contingency, the dialectic between which is pivotal in the poetics of Ossi di seppia. And the key “miracle” Montale explores, crucial to this dialectic and its two sides, is music.

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The poem that opens Ossi di seppia—“In limine”—acts as a prelude to the central ideas, images, and themes of the collection’s subsequent poems. Prominent among these themes are the natural world, the suspension of a single moment in time, the concept of a boundary or a seclusion, and a “break” in this boundary by means of a miracle. “In limine” introduces these themes with the image of a secluded garden or orchard: Godi se il vento ch’entra nel pomario vi rimena l’ondata della vita: qui dove affonda un morto viluppo di memorie, orto non era, ma reliquiario. (“In limine,” 1–5)58

This garden will return throughout Ossi di seppia, where its walls represent the prison-bars of rational semantics that bind the irrational, musical side of language. But in this initial poem the garden also announces Montale’s syncretism, his hope to engage all the senses, and in so doing to establish an interconnection between the unfolding of ordinary events and the ethics of “waiting for a miracle.” In the poem’s central sequence, seemingly banal natural sounds become vehicles of much deeper meanings: in the second stanza, for example, the image of a bird rising into flight becomes a revelation of religious magnitude: “il frullo che tu senti non è un volo,/ ma il commuoversi dell’eterno grembo.”59 In the subsequent poems of Ossi di Seppia, Montale articulates his syncretic vision—his dream of writing poetry that engages all the senses together—more fully, always grounding this vision in ordinary daily events that harken back to Shestov’s philosophy of the “everyday.” In “I limoni,” for instance, Montale calls on the reader to use all five senses in the perception of nature: Meglio se le gazzarre degli uccelli si spengono inghiottite dall’azzurro: più chiaro si ascolta il sussurro dei rami amici nell’aria che quasi non si muove, e i sensi di quest’odore che non sa staccarsi da terra e piove in petto una dolcezza inquieta. (“I limoni,” 11–17)60

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All the senses are thus evoked to participate in the immortalizing of a single moment suspended in time: the birds being swallowed by the blue sky, the branches rustling in the wind, and the fragrances that permeate the air. It is through this communion of simple, natural elements that Montale believes the individual can witness that “miracle” that would finally unveil the secret organization of the phenomenal world: Vedi, in questi silenzi in cui le cose s’abbandonano e sembrano vicine a tradire il loro ultimo segreto, talora ci si aspetta di scoprire uno sbaglio di Natura, il punto morto del mondo, l’anello che non tiene, il filo da disbrogliare che finalmente ci metta nel mezzo di una verità. (“I limoni,” 22–29)61

It is not just the mere combination of the senses, however, that leads to the perception of the Montalean miracle—the sense of sound must be privileged, for (as Schopenhauer stresses) it is music that connects the listener to the harmonics of reality. The word “harmony” comes from the Greek verb armozein, “to connect,” “to agree.” Montale understood this word in terms of the classical doctrine of “concordia discors,” the notion of an innate consonance occurring when opposite elements are joined.62 This is an important theme in classical poetry and one that had already been explored in modern Italian poetry by D’Annunzio. But Montale saw the concept in an often novel and personal light. In a 1951 interview, Montale talks about his own feeling of being in disharmony with the world: “Avendo sentito fin dalla nascita una totale disarmonia con la realtà che mi circondava, la materia della mia poesia non poteva essere che quella disarmonia.”63 Giuseppe Gazzola has described this disharmony in Montale’s life as a “severance between the individual and his landscape.”64 In the section entitled “Ossi di seppia,” Montale repeatedly portrays this rift through musical metaphor, expressing his relationship with the phenomenal world as a pervasive discord. But the origins of Montale’s harmony-disharmony dichotomy can be found in his earlier work, what Mario Forti has called the “pre-history” of Montale’s mature production.65 The continuity between these early works and Ossi di seppia emerges most clearly in the

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poem “Musica silenziosa.” Published in 1977, this poem first appeared in the journal Strumenti critici, where it introduced most of the themes and tropes that would later become central to Ossi di seppia, in particular the poet’s predilection for oxymoron (as witnessed by the title): Minuetto di sensazioni. Lietezza e insieme dolore, giorni che tu vorresti tanto che non vuoi nulla e si trastulla coi resti di vecchie enciclopediche ambizioni il cuore. (“Musica silenziosa,” 1–8)66

The poem’s musicality comes both from stylistic techniques—the abundant use of rhymes, short verses, and frequent alliteration—and also from a regularity of structure: it is divided into two sections (of two and three stanzas, respectively), each of which is introduced by the anaphora “Minuetto di sensazioni” (which is reprised in both verses of the last stanza). Through these features, the poem evokes the musical form of the minuet,67 not structurally, but by means of an underlying repetition that suggests two partners dancing to a repetitive musical work. These two dancers represent conflicts—between individuals, between music and semantics, between the phenomenal world and our limited ability to understand it, and between the conflicting emotions within Montale. The dancers’ ability to come together and dance their “minuetto di sensazioni” represents music’s capacity to reconcile and harmonize conflicts—the concordia discors expressed by the poem’s oxymoron title. The latent harmony Montale senses underneath the chaos of the phenomenal world is subject to a deep fragility—a passing truck is enough to shatter the balance: “Basta un carro che passi rombando per la strada/a renderti, e ne piangi, immagine di un mondo/che cada.”68 This image connects the poem to the opening stanza of another of the poet’s early works: “Elegia,” where the poet describes the world as a fragile, crystalline bubble, ever ready to burst: Non muoverti. Se ti muovi lo infrangi. È come una gran bolla di cristallo

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sottile stasera il mondo: è sempre più gonfia e si leva. O chi credeva di noi spiarne il ritmo e il respiro? (“Elegia,” 1–8)69

This bubble anticipates the image of the crystal bell (“campana di vetro”) that will reappear in Montale’s “Intervista immaginaria,” a cage inside which he believes himself to be living. In both cases, he is torn between a desire to understand the cage and an innate awareness that such a penetrating understanding would destroy the harmony of the world (burst the bubble, crack the crystal). The harmony, thus, is by necessity always “secret,” maintained by its own resistance to human comprehension (“O chi credeva/di noi spiarne il ritmo e il respiro?”).

4.4   Music of the Heart With regard to music, the most significant work of Montale’s early poems is the suite Accordi. First published in 1922 in the literary journal Primo tempo,70 each of this series’ seven poems is named after one of the principal musical instruments of a standard orchestra: “Violini” (“Violins”), “Violoncelli” (“Cellos”), “Contrabbasso” (“Double Bass”), “Flauti-­ Fagotti” (“Bassoons”), “Oboe” (“Oboe”), “Corno inglese” (“English horn”), and “Ottoni” (“Brass”). Beyond this, the number of poems— seven—represents the seven notes of the diatonic scale. The first poem, “Violini,” reprises themes and motifs already seen in “Musica silenziosa”—music as a metaphorical gateway, the violin as a symbol, the underlying harmony of nature, the poet’s inability to fully comprehend that nature, and the awaiting of a miracle (“Sono qui nell’attesa di un prodigio”) that would reveal a fleeting glimpse of that underlying harmony (“troppe strade/distendi innanzi alle pupille/mie smarrite:/quali si snodano, erbite”): Solo m’è dato nel miracolo del giorno, o cuore fatto muto, scordare gioie o crucci, ed offrirti alla vita

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tra un mattinare arguto di balestrucci! (“Violini,” 21–27)71

The “miracle” motif that will later arise in Ossi di seppia appears here in the form of a verb I have already discussed: “meriggiare,” to rest, to experience a moment of suspension in time. It is in such a moment that the heart can find peace and attain the convergence of all the senses in a harmonic communion with nature. In Ossi di seppia this theme will be particularly important, as I will show by examining “I limoni” and revisiting “Meriggiare, pallido e assorto.” When the suspended moment represented by “meriggiare” is linked to the theme of “awaiting the everyday miracle,” we see Montale use the verb “scordare,” to “untune,” a verb that carries the common connotation “to forget”: “solo/m’è dato nel miracolo del giorno. O cuore fatto muto/scordare gioie o crucci.” This is a kind of reversal of the Proustian motif of music as a trigger for memory,72 and Montale’s implication is that the key to experiencing miraculous silence is the willingness to renounce rational thought and memory, an untuning of mind and self that leads to a brief moment of communion with nature’s own deeper harmony (represented by the chirping birds at sunrise).73 “Violoncelli” provides the first example of Montale’s borrowing from opera librettos, a practice that he will develop more fully in later poems. A key signpost of this borrowing is the aforementioned imperative “Ascolta” (“Listen up”), which he will reprise in other poems of Ossi di seppia. With the command to listen, Montale involves his reader in a dialogic, almost theatrical exchange74: Ascolta il nostro canto che ti va nelle vene e da queste nel cuore ti si accoglie, che pare angusto, frangersi: siamo l’Amore, ascoltaci! (“Violoncelli,” 1–3)75

But “Violoncelli” also dwells on the theme of silence: it is only when human sounds subside that the poet is able to listen to the music of nature and tune his heart to its harmony. The suite’s title itself, Accordi (Chords) underscores this idea while also mixing it with the human dimension— accordo also meaning “agreement.” Through these early poems, Montale chronicles his impossible ambition to come to a personal “agreement” with the world, to put his own emotions in tune with the phenomenal.

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The verb accordare derives from the Latin for “heart,” cor (gen. cordis). Sanguineti stresses the heart as a central motif of Montale’s early poetry, referring to this motif as a “mythology of the heart.”76 The heart, as a metonymy for the human soul, becomes the poet’s interlocutor in “Corno inglese,” the only poem of the original Accordi suite to be included in Ossi di seppia: Il vento che nasce e muore nell’ora che lenta s’annera suonasse te pure stasera scordato strumento, cuore. (“Corno inglese,” 14–18)77

The dwindling wind blows the late day toward darkness—the poet wishes this wind could play his own heart, finally tune it to the earth. In an important study, Gian-Paolo Biasin argues that Montale’s wind motif is a borrowing from Claude Debussy’s Préludes, as well as from English Romantic poetry.78 Montale revisits this motif throughout Ossi di seppia, where the wind is a central point in the vocabulary of his relationship to the natural landscape.79 It is the wind—in the following excerpt a double for the tone of the English horn—that finally triggers the poet’s emotions and thus plays his heart like a musical instrument: Il vento che stasera suona attento —Ricorda un forte scotere di lame— Gli strumenti dei fitti alberi e spazza L’orizzonte di rame Dove strisce di luce si protendono Come aquiloni al cielo che rimbomba. (“Corno inglese,” 1–6)80

This poem evokes and challenges D’Annunzio’s pantheistic vision of nature in “La pioggia nel pineto,” as well as that poem’s trope of the natural world as a symphony orchestra. But whereas in D’Annunzio’s poem the speaker eventually becomes one with the landscape around him, Montale’s poem stages a divorce between nature and the speaker’s soul, a laceration that reflects his own inner torment (which is on display in the other poems of Accordi). This theme is developed further in “Ossi di seppia,” where the laceration and the desire to heal it become a call for a

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“tuning” of the poet to the phenomenal world. In “Corno inglese,” this call arrives in the form of the wind—as we have seen, a multilayered symbol—which Montale invokes to reactivate and direct his heart, ever a musical instrument, ever out of tune. Wind imagery also fills “Minstrels,” a poem dedicated to and inspired by Debussy (1862–1951). In its first draft, the poem was entitled “Musica sognata” (“Dreamed music”) and was an attempt to translate into poetry the last of the French composer’s 12 preludes.81 According to Biasin, it is in this poem that Montale most successfully effects the union of music and poetry he envisioned82: Musica senza rumore che nasce dalle strade, si innalza a stento e ricade, e si colora di tinte ora scarlatte ora biade, e inumidisce gli occhi, così che il mondo si vede come socchiudendo gli occhi nuotar nel biondo. (“Minstrels,” 11–18)83

In his analysis of this poem, Alberto Bertoni expands on Biasin’s idea,84 focusing on the metrical structure Montale employs: regular meters, such as hendecasyllables and settenarios, frequent rhymes and assonances. Most importantly, Montale evokes a specific metrical form of the ballad: the ballata minore, which comprises an opening chorus and two or three stanzas of eight verses each, always following a very precise rhyming scheme. However, within the frame of the ballata minore, Montale subverts these metrical conventions, deconstructing the familiar musicality of rhyme by alternating regular verses (hendecasyllables and settenarios) with prosaic passages or truncated verses, creating a dissonant effect that seeks to mimic the complexity of Debussy’s music, his experiments with dissonance and chromaticism. Further elements in this poem allude to a vocabulary of motifs and themes already seen in previous poems. For example, Montale employs a familiar oxymoron to highlight the philosophical complexity that sound represents in his poetry: “Musica senza rumore,” echoing his earlier “Musica silenziosa.” In addition, Montale reprises the syncretism I have highlighted in previous poems, underscoring the tangibility of sound,

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which, even when one cannot fully hear it (“Non s’ode quasi”), can nonetheless be breathed (“si respira.”). Likewise, the motif of the heart is central to “Minstrels”:        

 Bruci tu pure tra le lastre dell’estate, cuore che ti smarrisci! Ed ora incauto provi le ignote note sul tuo flauto.85 (“Minstrels,” 23–26)

The heart here symbolizes music’s ability to stir emotion, to bring one to tears (“inumidisce gli occhi”). In conjuring Debussy, Montale underscores both this emotional dimension and its dissonant aspects, emphasizing how his own feelings can seem lost (the “cuore che ti smarrisci”), and how his heart cannot fully comprehend the very notes it plays. In “translating” Debussy’s preludes, Montale attempts not merely to reproduce music through language, but rather to capture those characteristics that normally belong to music alone: its ability to channel one’s emotions directly, unmediated by the semantic limitations of language and rationality. The paradox of “Minstrels” is thus that Montale seeks to produce an a-verbal effect through language itself. This fraught relation between words and sounds comes to mirror the fraught relation between nature and the mind, evoking the way in which the mind can sense nature’s harmony but is perpetually unable to place that harmony in a rational frame. In “Le parole e la musica,” Montale explores this “vexed question of the relations, both marital and extra marital, of the Word and Music.”86 The poet ponders the nuances of the practice of adding musical accompaniment to poetry, distinguishing between audiences and critics who prefer “choral works in which the word disappears,” and those who would subjugate music altogether to the supremacy of the spoken word. Neither extreme seems to please Montale: poetry, he asserts, must be distinct from music, and yet must also possess its own music, even though this can only be considered a “second degree” music. Montale goes on in “Le parole e la musica” to focus on a historical period during which poetry and music entered into an especially harmonious relationship: from the age of the sixteenth-century Italian poets to that of composers such as Debussy himself and Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951), who created music with the utmost attention to and respect for the words they scored.87 Montale concludes, however, by warning that

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not all poetry can be used for vocal music and that often the union of music and words simply happens fortuitously (a clue to his personal process as a writer).88 Montale later returned to and expanded on the same issue in a brief article published in 1963—“Parole in Musica” (“Words in Music”).89 His conclusion this time is uncompromising: poetic language is autonomous, already possessing its own music. Only low-grade poetry can be easily set to music—the union of music and words, that is, cannot be forced, but only “encouraged” without betraying the nature of either form of expression.90 In 1975, Montale clarified this conundrum in his acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in literature. His talk, entitled “È ancora possibile la poesia?” (“Is Poetry Still Possible?”), attempts to define the nature of poetry and frame its role in modern society. While he admits that retracing a coherent history of poetry would be a futile effort, he insists upon his conviction that the origin of poetry is to be found in humanity’s musical impulse.91 For Montale, poetry became “visual” only with the rise of the Provençal tradition, a period when the distinctive visual organization of verses, strophes, and stanzas came about. In Montale’s view, even though poetry subsequently became associated with this visual existence on the page, it never lost its link with its aural genesis.92 Even the standard visual format of a poem—what Montale called its “vertical” form—harkens back to its musical origins in its resemblance to musical bars (which Montale drew attention to with his many da capos).93 Montale’s ideas are shared by Calvin Brown, the founder of melopoetics whom I presented in the Introduction. In Music and Literature, Brown isolates a series of characteristics that unite the two art forms of his title.94 For Brown, a poet is concerned above all with the technical matters of meter, rhyme, assonance, and alliteration: this focus on sound-craft is the fundamental basis of the kinship between poets and composers. In Brown’s view, however, the core of the relationship between literature and music lies not only in form, but also in the negotiation between the semantic value of language and the universal expression of music. For Brown, “both music and literature are presented to the intellect and the emotions by means of sound, the principal difference being that musical sound is used only for itself and the sounds of literature have external significance.”95 The sounds of literature are able to express what he calls “negative meaning”—they are able to describe things not present. The sounds of music, on the other hand, always happen in the now, and are free from the constraints of semantics. Brown sees the combination of the two—the reach

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of language and the immediacy of music—as the key to expressing the universal, that which transcends the individual and is part of all humans’ experience. This same dialectic can be applied to Montale’s musical thematics—the “cage” he is ever aware of is the semantic structure of language, experienced at first as a prison but eventually as something he sees as an essential opposite to sound, where the tension between the two is what makes harmony possible. Montale’s ambition to create a more musical poetic language, however, was in the end only sporadically successful, functional only in a limited number of his poems. Throughout Ossi di seppia one can notice a progressive but steady abandonment of musicality. As I have shown, Montale’s vision of a utopian “accordo” with nature is regularly supplanted by images of discord. In his collection “Mediterraneo,” while the presence of music is more limited, two poems help clarify the fate of Montale’s musical trajectory. In “Giunge a volte, repente,” Montale reprises the musical motif of “accordare,” this time in order to stress a final, impossible concord between his heart and that of his addressee: Giunge a volte, repente, un’ora che il tuo cuore disumano ci spaura e dal nostro si divide. Dalla mia la tua musica sconcorda, allora, ed è nemico ogni tuo moto. (“Giunge a volte, repente,” 1–5)96

In “Potessi almeno costringere,” from the same section, Montale shows that even his open dissatisfaction over his inability to express music in written words does not diminish the force of his longtime ambition to do so: Dato mi fosse accordare alle tue voci il mio balbo parlare Io che sognava rapirti le salmastre parole in cui natura ed arte si confondono, per gridar meglio la mia malinconia di fanciullo invecchiato che non doveva pensare. Ed invece non ho che le lettere fruste dei dizionari, e l’oscura voce che amore detta s’affioca, si fa lamentosa letteratura. (“Potessi almeno costringere,” 4–13)97

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The passage’s literary allusions point to the insufficiency Montale had long found in his poetic predecessors. With the line “il tuo cuore disumano/ci spaura,” Montale recalls Leopardi’s “L’infinito”: “per poco il cuor non si spaura.” He then echoes D’Annunzio, the lines “io che sognava rapirti/le salmastre parole/in cui natura e arte si confondono” evoking a passage from “La pioggia nel pineto”: “odo parole più nuove/…/piove/su le tamerici/salmastre ed arse”). In “Potessi almeno costringere,” Montale laments the limitations of language (“Le lettere fruste/dei dizionari”) and expresses a sense of defeat and disillusion toward literature. Both poems are centered on a sense of discord between the poet and his addressee, a gap that comes to represent the insufficiency of language and of earlier poetic models. As we have seen, however, this same dissatisfaction with his predecessors conditioned Montale to look to music for an answer, to move past the magniloquence of recent poets by listening to the sounds of Verdi, Puccini, Mascagni, and others.98

4.5   Language of Counter-Eloquence In the great Italian traditions of verismo and opera, Montale found vehicles for the counter-eloquence he hoped to develop to better represent everyday reality. He confirms as much in a brief essay he dedicated to his friend, the musicologist Massimo Mila (eventually included in Prime alla scala [1981]). In this essay—“Il paradosso della cattiva musica” (“The Paradox of Bad Music”)—Montale acknowledges his preference for “cattiva musica” (“bad music”), an umbrella term describing opera, operettas, musicals, and more broadly, any musical production of popular appeal that, in his view, would be dismissed by the intellectual elite.99 The essay echoes Proust’s praise of bad music in Les plaisirs et les jours (1896). Here, Proust underscores the social significance of what he defines as “bad music”: imbued with the sentimental history of a society, “bad music” possesses the ability to give voice to social classes otherwise excluded by more intellectualized musical styles. Montale echoes the French novelist’s analysis, contrasting what he defines as bad music with “academic” music. Behind this juxtaposition one can discern Montale’s preference for opera over symphonic music (arguably a “loftier” category than popular opera). This opposition mirrors Montale’s antagonism toward the previous generation of poets, those whom he labeled (in “I limoni”) as the “specialists of literature.” Montale cites the work of Verdi, among others, as an example of “bad music” that was eventually rediscovered and accepted by

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professional musicologists. “Il paradosso della cattiva musica” is in the end Montale’s declaration of his love for melodrama and opera, and his articulation of what opera’s connection to the “everyday” can achieve when used in poems (that burning desire of his early poetry, like Ossi di seppia).100 Verdino has argued that Montale’s early poetry was largely an attempt to compensate for a missed career as an opera singer. But Montale did not go about this by simply scattering haphazard operatic allusions: as I have argued, his work shows a pattern of juxtaposing the popular refrains of opera to the over-sophisticated language of D’Annunzio, Pascoli, Carducci, and others. By populating his poetry with operatic and musical signposts, Montale was able to give voice to some of his most pressing philosophical concerns—not just the issue of “counter-eloquence” but also the Schopenhauerian mysteries of the “secret harmony” underlying the exterior world, and the attuning of the individual to this harmony by merging different forms of art into new ones.

Notes 1. Eugenio Montale, “Variazione II,” Il secondo mestiere: Prose I, 164: “The first opera I ever I listened to was Sonnambula, at a theater in which between one act and another one could drink sodas in a bottle. I do not know in what year, certainly in the first decade of this century. I remember everything about that performance, even the names of the principal artists . . . Sunk into a rented pillow I spent two hours of ecstasy, interrupted, however, by the decision of my father, who ruled at the end of the second act, that it was late and necessary to return home urgently for dinner.” Gino Tanasini dates this event to March 10, 1912 in “Ambiente e vita musicale negli anni della formazione,” in Montale, la musica, i musicisti, ed. Roberto Iovino and Stefano Verdino (Genoa: Sagep Editrice, 1996), 31. 2. Carlo Emilio Gadda, “Montale o l’uomo musico,” Tempo 8, no. 196 (25 February-4 March 1943): 33–44. Also in Saggi giornali e favole I (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), 881–885. 3. Eugenio Montale, “In chiave di Fa,” Farfalla di Dinard (Milan: Mondadori, 1960), 69–73. 4. Montale, “Il successo,” Farfalla di Dinard, 74–79. 5. The opera librettos known to have been translated by Montale are the following: Goffredo Petrassi, Il Cordovano: opera in un atto (1949)— Montale adapted a work by Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra; William Walton, Troilus and Cressida: Opera in Three Acts (1954)—Montale

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translated into Italian the libretto written by Christopher Hassal; Juan José Castro, Proserpina e lo straniero (1952)—Montale translated into Italian the original libretto written by Omar del Carlo; Manuel De Falla, Atlàntida (1927–1949)—first performed at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, it was adapted in Italian by Montale. These adaptations are a testament to Montale’s active work in the world of opera, although they attracted little or no critical attention. 6. While he was equally attentive to both the stage and the audience, his musical acumen stands in stark contrast to D’Annunzio’s comparable activity as a music journalist. As I will explain later, Montale’s approach to music, just like his initiation to poetry, is constantly defined by a contrast with D’Annunzio. 7. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, “Montale critico musicale,” Studi Novecenteschi 11, no. 28 (1984): 197–238. 8. This short story further underscores the role that opera played in Montale’s life, as a filter through which he retells his autobiography, when one considers the geographical origins of this double apparition. Giuseppe Gazzola reflects on the biographical circumstances of this short story, which was originally published in the Corriere della sera on February 2, 1948, a mere month after Montale moved to Milan. As Gazzola puts it, “Montale, having just arrived in Milan, reflects on his past through the figures of the two opera singers. The Geonese Marcello … The Florentine Astorre…” Gazzola, Montale the Modernist (Florence: Olschki, 2016), 212. 9. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, “Due agnizioni di lettura,” Strumenti critici 15 (1971): 264–269. 10. “È formulabile la proposta che Montale, studente di canto proprio nella chiave di Jago, gran frequentatore di teatri operistici, abbia magari inconsapevolmente custodito nella coscienza poetica il ‘meriggiare’ boitiano piuttosto di quelli indicati dal Mengaldo connessi a un dizionario diverso?” Gianandrea Gavazzeni, “Fra poesia e musica,” Nuova rivista musicale 2 (1968): 1089–1091. See also Gavazzeni, Il sipario rosso: Diario 1950–1976 (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 694–696. Gavazzeni refers here to another article by Mengaldo. See “Da D’Annunzio a Montale: ricerche sulla formazione e la storia del linguaggio poetico montaliano,” Ricerche sulla lingua poetica contemporanea (Padua: Circolo Filologico Linguistico Padovano, 1966), 161–259. Also in Tradizione del Novecento: da D’Annunzio a Montale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975). 11. Mario Aversano, Montale e il libretto d’opera (Naples: Editrice Ferraro, 1984). 12. Roberto Iovino and Stefano Verdino, eds., Montale, la musica e i musicisti (Genoa: Sagep Editrice, 1996).

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13. Gilberto Lonardi, Il fiore dell’addio: Leonora, Manrico e altri fantasmi del melodramma nella poesia di Montale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003). 14. “I wanted to wring the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language, even at the risk of a counter-eloquence.” Eugenio Montale, “Intervista Immaginaria,” Sulla poesia (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), 565. Trans. J. Galassi, 300. 15. Montale’s relationship with D’Annunzio is central to understanding his early poetry. Montale intentionally confronts D’Annunzio in the attempt to distance himself from the former’s style, but D’Annunzio’s shadow is always looming behind Montale’s early poems, manifesting itself through textual interchanges and citations. In this case, Montale attacks D’Annunzio’s use of language: while denying the desire to include any botanical vocabulary in his poetry, he matter-of-factly mentions such plants as “bossi ligustri e acanti” (boxwoods, privets, and acanthus). Likewise, while Montale seems to work to dissociate himself from D’Annunzio’s “La Pioggia nel Pineto,” he nonetheless borrows some of the poem’s rhetorical devices. Montale also recalls a later stanza of the same poem: “Ascolta. Piove/dalle nuvole sparse” (8–9). For a complete analysis of the textual references and exchanges between Montale and D’Annunzio, see Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, “Da D’Annunzio a Montale,” Tradizione del Novecento: Da D’Annunzio a Montale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975), 13–106. 16. “Listen: the laureled poets/stroll only around shrubs/with learned names: ligustrum, acanthus, box.” Trans. Arrowsmith, The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), 5. Italics mine. 17. The centrality of the verb “ascoltare” is also attested by its variations throughout the several drafts of this poem. In the different editions of the poem, Montale fine-tunes the first line, presenting different variations of the verb: (1) “Ascoltami, i poeti laureati,” (2) “Ascolta,/i poeti laureati,” and (3) “Ascolta,/i poeti laureati.” Montale, L’opera in versi, 863. 18. In deciphering this operatic reference, Aversano points to a specific moment in the prologue of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci (1892), in which the protagonist Tonio addresses the public through a similar formula, after a long series of imperatives: “Or ascoltate com’egli è svolto” (italics mine). Aversano, Montale e il libretto d’opera, 40. 19. “Listen, listen./Collect the few things/I’ve left behind./In my drawer/ there’s a little golden bracelet/and my prayer book./Wrap everything in an apron/and I’ll send the porter to pick them up.” Italics mine. 20. Luca Carlo Rossi, Montale e l’«orrido repertorio operistico», 14. 21. L’opera in versi, 31: “What I ask, my life, is not firm/outlines, plausible looks, possessions./Now, in your restless running, wormwood/and honey taste the same.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 35. Italics mine.

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22. “My life, restless lover,/I will always say “Floria, I love you!”/Ah! Calm your soul,/I will always tell you I love you!” Italics mine. 23. “Paths that struggle along the banks,/then dip among the tufted canes,/ into the orchards, among the lemon trees.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 5. Italics mine. 24. “The chapel leads to a poorly secure orchard,/next to it, a cane field/will take you to of one of my villas.” 25. “Quando un giorno da un malchiuso portone/tra gli alberi di una corte/ ci si mostrano I gialli dei limoni” (And, one day, through a gate ajar,/ among the trees in a courtyard,/we see the yellows of the lemon trees). Trans. Arrowsmith. This connection has already been suggested by Aversano, Montale e il libretto d’opera, 43. 26. L’opera in versi, 47: “How everything around you bows/before the wagging of your head,/O winged imp. And you don’t know it.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 49. Italics mine. 27. “MANRICO (rising) We are finally alone. Please, go on/and tell me this fatal story/AZUCENA And you, even you ignore it?/Young boy, your ambitions/drove you far away from here!” 28. L’opera in versi, 28: “To laze at noon, pale and thoughtful,/by a blazing garden wall; to listen,/in brambles and brake, to blackbirds/scolding, the snake’s rustle.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 31. 29. Contini, Una lunga fedeltà, 12. 30. D’Annunzio, L’isottéo/Isaotta nel bosco: “Meriggiava quel re sotto il pomario/che splendeva ai suoi dì come un tesoro” (That king spent his days in the orchard,/which shone at the time as a treasure); Gozzano: “La sala da pranzo che sogno nel meriggiare sonnolento” (The dining room that I dream in the sleepy noon) (“L’ipotesi,” V); Boine, Frantumi: “È così bello a volte meriggiare, all’ombra di un carrubo in faccia al mare!” (It is so beautiful sometimes to spend the noon in the shade of a carob on the seaside). For more on the theme of noon in Italian poetry, see also Nicolas James Perella, Midday in Italian Literature: Variations of an Archetypal Theme (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 31. Gavazzeni, “Fra poesia e musica,” 1091. 32. “It is her habit/To stroll among those trees at noontime/With my wife. Await her here.” Trans. W. Weaver, 349. 33. An example occurs in the third stanza: “Osservare tra frondi il palpitare/ lontano di scaglie di mare/mentre si levano tremuli scricchi/di cicale dai calvi picchi” (9–12) (To peer through the leaves at the sea,/scale on scale, pulsing in the distance,/while the cicada’s quavering cry/shrills from naked peaks). L’opera in versi, 28. Trans. Arrowsmith, 31. 34. Luca Carlo Rossi, Montale e l’«orrido repertorio operistico», 17. 35. “Giacomo Puccini è il musicista che più di ogni altro si è infiltrato nella memoria di Montale diventando oggetto di una speciale predilezione”

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(Giacomo Puccini is the musician who, more than any other, has infiltrated Montale’s memory, becoming the object of a special predilection). Rossi, Montale e l’«orrido repertorio operistico», 17. 36. For instance, Aversano analyzes the influence of the La Bohème libretto on “Il fuoco che scoppietta,” focusing in particular on a series of textual loans from the first “quadro” of Puccini’s opera. Aversano, Montale e il libretto d’opera, 36. 37. This is the thesis of Arman Schwartz and Emanuele Senici in Giacomo Puccini and his World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 38. Puccini worked closely with his librettists. As Gabriella Biagi Ravenni and Michele Girardi explain, “a working method which functioned perfectly was set up between Puccini, Illica and Giacosa. Priority was given to the dramatic structure, which gave Puccini his first musical ideas. The outline was then versified, according to a fixed scheme . . . Puccini attached great importance to poetic metre and often asked his collaborators to adjust the verse according to his requirements, which differed from the traditional demands of nineteenth-century opera composers.” Gabriella Biagi Ravenni and Michele Girardi, “Puccini,” in Oxford Music Online, 2001, Oxford University Press, accessed July 13, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.bc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/40280pg5 39. Luca Carlo Rossi, Montale e l’«orrido repertorio operistico», 31. 40. “La Bohème ha un parlare suo speciale, un gergo. Il suo vocabolario è l’inferno della retorica e il paradiso del neologismo” (La bohème has a special dialect, a distinct jargon of its own. This vocabulary is the hell of rhetoric and the paradise of neologism). Murger, La Bohème: Four Acts, 5. In their premise, Giacosa and Illica underscore the extent to which their opera is not a faithful adaptation of Murger’s book. Rather, they have “sought to derive inspiration from the French writer’s admirable preface.” They go on to underscore their faithfulness only to the characters of the bohemian life they sought to portray. 41. Montale reviewed La Bohème several times. In one of the earliest cases, he writes: “La Bohème è giustamente ritenuta il capolavoro di Giacomo Puccini e resta un’opera che può insegnare molte cose. Folta com’è, direi quasi stipata di pezzi chiusi e di melodie, ha uno sviluppo continuo, senza interruzioni. La melodia non vi impedisce minimamente il racconto, anzi, lo sostiene. Le romanze sono qui autopresentazioni dei personaggi e non pezzi di bravura. E la musica fluisce inesauribile” (La Bohème is rightly considered Giacomo Puccini’s masterpiece and remains a work that can teach many things. Foul as it is, I would almost say crammed with closed pieces and melodies, it has a continuous development, without interruption. The melody does not minimize the story; in fact, it supports it. Romance is here the self-presentation of characters and not a matter of

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skill. And the music flows inexhaustible). Montale, Corriere dell’informazione, March 18–19, 1956. Also in Luca Carlo Rossi, Montale e l’«orrido repertorio operistico», 30. 42. Lonardi explains that Puccini’s use of the oxymoron aims at excavating, with the support of music, the unique existential intensity concealed behind the banality of everyday life (115). Lonardi underscores Montale’s affinity for Puccini, due not only to his tendency to mix different registers and his predilection for the oxymoron, but also to a fundamental epistemological kinship. He makes a strong argument that Montale admired Puccini for his ability to find in daily life a revelation of universal truth. Lonardi, Il fiore dell’addio, 132–138. 43. Montale understands La Bohème as an “opera verista.” In reviewing the opera for the Spoleto Festival, on June 9, 1960, Montale writes: “Nata in un clima veristico-sentimentale La Bohème è quasi sempre rimasta in quell’atmosfera anche quando grandi maestri l’hanno diretta; ed è abbastanza recente il tentativo—disastroso—di darle altro carattere” (Born in a sentimental climate of verismo, La Bohème has almost always maintained that spirit even when great masters directed it; the disastrous attempt to give it some other characteristic is only quite recent). Montale, Il secondo mestiere: Arte, musica, società, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), 486. 44. Aversano detected an echo in the caption of the “prehistorical” poem “Accordi.” The critic also argues that the use of the pronoun “you” in the opening line of I limoni, as well as the general tone of the poem, is influenced in part by the opera’s prologue. More explicitly, in the poem “Keepsake,” Montale names a long list of characters from his favorite operas and operettas: among them is Tonio, the protagonist of Leoncavallo’s opera. See Aversano, Montale e il libretto d’opera, 39–40. 45. “Leoncavallo was determined to become the bard of the ‘holy war,’ in conscious imitation of Verdi, bard—as Leoncavallo insisted—of the Risorgimento. Thus the composer of Pagliacci wrote, hastily, Goffredo Mameli, performed at the Carlo Felice in Genoa on April 27, 1916. Given the date and the subject, the work—conducted by the composer— had an inevitable success.” Weaver, Golden Century of Italian Opera, 235. 46. Rosita Tordi Castria, “Montale e ‘Iris’ di Illica-Mascagni,” Montale europeo (Rome: Bulzoni, 2002), 28. 47. Montale writes: “L’Iris di Mascagni è per me un caro ricordo d’infanzia. Cominciai ad ammirarne il libretto (che mi pareva un miracolo di poesia) quando ancora non conoscevo una nota dello spartito” (Mascagni’s Iris is for me a dear childhood memory. I began to appreciate its libretto— which seemed to me a miracle of poetry—when I still did not know a single note of the score). Montale, Arte, musica, società, 631.

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48. In the poem “Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato,” the image of the final line (“era la statua della sonnolenza/del meriggio, e la nuvola, e il falco alto levato”) echoes a passage from the libretto of Iris. In the first act, the character Osaka sings: “La mia voce vibra nell’aria,/desta gli echi ai monti/e vola alta nel ciel/come cicogna o falco” (My voice vibrates in the air,/awakens the echoes of the mountains/and flies high in the sky/ like stork or hawk). Italics mine. Rosita Tordi argues for the influence of Mascagni’s opera in the creation of Clizia in Montale europeo, 27–44. 49. Reviewing Puccini’s “trittico,” Montale wonders whether the former was a verista composer at all. The only stylistic aspect that would qualify him as such was his desire to represent everyday truth. Montale, Arte, musica, società, 694. For Montale, Mascagni’s verismo was only occasional, and his verista label was due to the subject of his first work, Cavalleria rusticana, in adapting Verga’s novella. Mascagni himself was indifferent on the subject. Montale, Arte, musica, società, 817. 50. Aversano, Montale e il libretto d’opera, 39. Assante, “Montale e la musica,” 27. 51. Galassi, 300. (Montale, Sulla poesia, 565: “Ubbidii a un bisogno di espressione musicale.”) 52. Montale, Sulla poesia, 565: “I wanted my words to come closer than those of the other poets I’d read. Closer to what? I seemed to be living under a bell jar, and yet I felt I was close to something essential. A subtle veil, a thread, barely separated me from the definitive quid. Absolute expression would have meant breaking that veil, that thread: an explosion, the end of the world as representation . . . my wish to come close remained musical, instinctive, unprogrammatic.” Trans. Galassi, 300. 53. Among the most recent commentators on this relationship, Paolo Zoboli argues that Montale’s philosophical education was profoundly inspired by Schopenhauer’s thought, an influence reflected in the 1925 edition of Ossi di seppia, in “Montale e Schopenhauer,” Quaderni del “Cairoli” 29 (2015): 174–203. Zoboli also argues that with the 1928 edition, Montale sought to overcome Schopenhauer’s model. Giuseppe Gazzola discusses Montale’s unmasking of the world as deceptive representation as influenced by Schopenhauer in “Beyond the Threshold,” Montale, the Modernist, 101–149. Among other fundamental authors who explore the link between Montale and the German philosopher, see Giovanni Bardazzi, “Schopenhauer tra Montale e Sbarbaro,” Studi Novecenteschi 15, no. 35 (1988): 63–107; Edoardo Sanguineti, “Forse un mattino andando,” Letture montaliane in occasione dell’80°compleanno del poeta (Genoa: Bozzi, 1977), 49–52. 54. Schopenhauer discusses music in particular in Volume 1, Book 3, paragraph 52 of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. For reference, see for

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instance Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E.  F. J.  Payne (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1966), 255–267. Schopenhauer continues his discussion of music in the Supplements to Book 3, Chapter 39 of Volume 2. See for reference Arthur Schopenhauer, “XXXIX.  On the Metaphysics of Music,” The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1966), 447–457. 55. On the influence of Lev Shestov (1866–1938) on the poetry and thought of Eugenio Montale, see Gilberto Lonardi, Il vecchio e il giovane e altri studi su Montale (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1980), 43; Franco Contorbia, Montale, Genova, il modernismo e altri saggi montaliani (Bologna: Pendragon, 1999), 45–48; Roberto Orlando, “Il ‘razionalismo’ di Montale fra Bergson e Sestov,” Applicazioni montaliane (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 2001); and Lonardi, Il fiore dell’addio,113–38. 56. Lonardi, “Primo, non disunire: Mimì, Šestov, I limoni,” Il fiore dell’addio, 113–59. 57. Montale, Sulla poesia, 564–65: “Directly, I know few existentialist texts, but many years ago I read a few writers like Shestov, a Kierkagaardian very close to the positions of that philosophy . . . For me, the miracle was evident, like necessity. Immanence and transcendence aren’t separable, and to make a state of mind out of the perennial mediation of the two terms, as modern historicism proposes, doesn’t resolve the problem, or resolves it with showy optimism.” Trans. Galassi, 299. 58. L’opera in versi, 5: “Rejoice when the breeze that enters the orchard/ brings you back the tidal rush of life:/here, where dead memories/mesh and founder,/was no garden, but a reliquary.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 3. 59. “That surge you hear is no whir of wings,/but the stirring of the eternal womb.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 3. 60. L’opera in versi, 10: “Better, if the gay palaver of the birds/is stilled, swallowed by the blue:/more clearly now, you hear the whisper/of genial branches in that air barely astir, the sense of that smell/inseparable from earth,/that rains its restless sweetness in the heart.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 5. 61. “See, in these silences when things/let themselves go and seem almost/ to reveal their final secret,/we sometimes expect/to discover a flaw in Nature,/the world’s dead point, the link that doesn’t hold,/the thread that disentangled, might at least lead us/to the center of a truth.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 5. 62. “The doctrine of ‘concordia discors’—the idea that the numerous conflicts between the four elements in nature (air, earth, fire and water) paradoxically create an overall harmony in the world—can be traced back to the Greek philosophers, Pythagoras (c. 580–500  B.C.), Heraclitus (c. 544–483 B.C.), and Empedocles (c. 490–430 B.C.)”. The Latin phrase

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that is used to encapsulate the idea was first used by Horace in the 12th epistle of his first book (c. 20 B.C.) to describe Empedocles’ philosophy that the world is explained and shaped by a perpetual strife between the four elements, ordered by love into a jarring unity, or, as the musical metaphor held it, a “discordant harmony.” Ian Gordon, “Concordia discors,” The Literary Encyclopedia, first published January 26, 2007, accessed January 6, 2019. https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics. php?rec=true&UID=1693 63. “Having felt from birth a total disharmony with the reality that surrounded me, the very matter of my poetry could only be that disharmony.” Montale, “Confessioni di scrittori (Interviste con se stessi),” Sulla poesia, 570. Italics mine. For a more detailed reconstruction of the philosophical background of the word “harmony” and the concept of “concordia discors,” see Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung,” ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963). 64. Gazzola, Montale, the Modernist, 123. 65. Marco Forti, Eugenio Montale: La poesia, la prosa di fantasia e d’invenzione (Milan: Mursia, 1974), 45. 66. “Minuet of sensations./Pleasure and pain,/days in which you would so much/you don’t want anything at all/and wastes its time/with what it’s left/of stale encyclopedic ambitions/your heart.” Montale, “Musica silenziosa,” Strumenti Critici 7, no. 21–22 (October 1973): 217–19. Also in Montale, L’opera in versi, 760. 67. “Minuet (Fr. menuet; Ger. menuett; It. minuetto; Sp. minueto, minué). A French dance. In a moderate or slow triple meter, it was one of the most popular social dances in aristocratic society from the mid-17th century to the late 18th. It was used as an optional movement in Baroque suites, and frequently appeared in movements of late 18th-century multi-movement forms such as the sonata, the string quartet, and the symphony, where it was usually paired with a trio.” Meredith Ellis Little, Grove Music Online, 2001, accessed January 7, 2019, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/ omo-9781561592630-e-0000018751 68. “A truck, roaring down the road, is enough/to remind you, and it makes you weep,/of a world that falls apart.” 69. Montale, L’opera in versi, 759: “Don’t move./If you move you break it./ It’s like a grand crystal ball/thin/tonight the world:/it’s more and more swell and floats/Who would have dared/to spy its rhythm and its breath?” 70. Eugenio Montale, “Accordi,” Primo tempo: Prima serie, vol. 2 (June 15, 1922): 37–41.

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71. Montale, L’opera in versi, 765: “Only/in the miracle of the day I am allowed,/oh muted heart/to forget joys and worries,/and to deliver you to life/in a witty morning of house martins.” 72. In mentioning Marcel Proust, I refer in particular to an episode of Swann’s Way, the first book of À la recherche du temps perdu, in which Charles Swann falls victim to the spell of a musical phrase played by the imaginary composer Vinteuil. This musical phrase recurs throughout the Recherche and coincides with significant moments of the character’s life. In The Captive, the narrator of the book experiences an epiphany following the execution of that musical phrase, which he considers life-changing. The music journalist Alex Ross recalls this episode in The New Yorker, August 24, 2009, 70–76. 73. The Italian verb “scordare” presents other ambiguities and musical undertones, as it can also be translated as “to put a musical instrument out of tune.” The poet signals a “disaccord” within his own soul. 74. The verb “ascoltare” explicitly reconnects music with the theme of love, as we can see in the semantic sequence: “ascolta” → “canto” → “cuore” → “Amore.” Montale subtly introduces the orphic idea of music’s power to temper emotions and tame passions, echoing celebrated precedents in European literature, including E. T. A. Hoffmann, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and Lev Tolstoy. 75. Montale, L’opera in versi, 766: “Listen to our song that goes into your veins/and by these in the heart you are welcomed,/it seems a narrow breaking down: we are Love, listen to us!” Italics mine. 76. Edoardo Sanguineti, Poesia italiana del Novecento (Torino: Einaudi, 1969), 44. 77. Montale, L’opera in versi, 11: “This wind that lifts and dies/in the slowly darkening hour—/if only it could play on you/this night, O discordant/ heart!” Trans. Arrowsmith, 7–9. 78. Gian-Paolo Biasin, Il vento di Debussy: La poesia di Montale nella cultura del Novecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985). M. H. Abrams discussed the centrality of the wind in English Romantic poetry in his essay “The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor” Kenyon Review 19.1 (1957): 113–130. The critic analyzes the frequency of this motif and notes that in major Romantic poems “the wind is not only a literal attribute of the landscape, but also a metaphor for a change in the poet’s mind . . . [it] serves as the vehicle for a complex subjective event . . . an outburst of creative inspiration following a period of sterility” (113–114). 79. Biasin writes: “È il vento che in ‘In limine’ rende possibile il ‘commuoversi dell’eterno grembo,’ la trasformazione del ‘pomario’ in crogiuolo; è il vento che suscita ‘un rovello,’ un desiderio di procedere, di salvare” (28).

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80. “Tonight this wind intently playing/(a wild clangor of blades comes to mind)/instruments of serried trees, that sweep/the copper horizon/ where stripes o light reach up/like kites, and the sky rings clamor back.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 7. 81. The epigraph of the poem reads “a C. Debussy” (to C. Debussy). Montale acknowledged Debussy’s influence on his early poems in the aforementioned “Intervista immaginaria”: “Quando cominciai a scrivere le prime poesie degli Ossi di seppia avevo certo un’idea della musica nuova e della nuova pittura. Avevo sentito i Minstrels di Debussy, e nella prima edizione del libro c’era una cosetta che si sforzava di rifarli: Musica sognata” (When I began to write the first poems in Ossi di seppia I certainly had an idea of the new music and the new painting. I had heard the Minstrels of Debussy, and in the first edition of the book there was a little something that tried to imitate it: “Musica sognata” [“Dreamed Music”]). Montale, Sulla poesia, 563. Trans. Galassi, 297. 82. Biasin, Il vento di Debussy, 33. 83. Montale, L’opera in versi, 14: “Soundless music/lifting from the streets/ struggles to climb, falls back,/takes on color,/now scarlet, now bright blue,/so moistening the eyes it seems/the lids are closed, the world/ aswim with gold.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 13. 84. Alberto Bertoni and Jonathan Sisco, Montale vs. Ungaretti: Introduzione alla lettura di due modelli di poesia del Novecento (Rome: Carocci, 2003), 211–20. 85. Montale, L’opera in versi, 14: “Leaps, plunges, fades,/then resumes,/ strangled, remote: consumed./Almost unheard, a breath./You burn too,/faint heart, baffled between the summer’s windowpanes! And now, impulsive,/your flute fumbles the unknown notes.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 13. Italics mine. 86. Montale, “Le parole e la musica,” Corriere della Sera, May 7, 1949. Also in Arte, musica, società, 112–16; and Verdino, 69–72. 87. Montale writes: “In genere la recente tradizione operistica ha ignorato il problema e considerato la parola come il necessario pretesto a far si che lo strumento ‘voce umana’ possa entrare nel gioco degli altri strumenti e farsi valere. Ma esiste anche una scuola che va dai nostri grandi cinquecentisti fino a Debussy e magari fino allo Schönberg (sic) di Pierrot lunare, e che pretende di avere un rispetto assoluto della parola, di creare ad essa il giusto prolungamento o alone sonoro, senza distruggerne l’individualità” (112). Debussy composed Pelléas and Mélisande, with lyrics written by Maurice Maeterlinck. It was staged for the first time in 1902. Schoenberg composed his Pierrot Lunaire (op. 21) in 1912, setting to music the German translation (by Otto Erich Hartleben) of the early poems written

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by the Belgian symbolist Albert Giraud (1860–1929). See note in Arte, musica, società, 1769. 88. Montale writes: “Anche i vecchi libretti, fatti apposta per essere musicati, confermano, quando toccano qualche espressione riuscita, che poesia e musica camminano per conto proprio e che il loro incontro resta affidato a fortune occasionali” (Even the old librettos, written specifically for music, confirm, when they touch on some successful expression, that poetry and music walk on their own and that their encounter is only fortuitous and occasional). Arte, musica, società, 115. 89. Eugenio Montale, “Parole in musica,” Corriere della Sera, August 4, 1963, in Sulla poesia, 143–44. 90. “La parola veramente poetica contiene già la propria musica e non ne tollera un’altra . . . solo la parola punto o poco poetica sopporta di essere l’attaccapanni di una successiva poesia” (The truly poetic word already contains its own music and does not tolerate another . . . only the word deprived of poetry can tolerate being the coat rack of a subsequent poem). Sulla poesia, 143. 91. “[La poesia] è un’entità di cui si sa assai poco . . . Per mio conto, se considero la poesia come un oggetto, ritengo ch’essa sia nata dalla necessità di aggiungere un suono vocale (parola) al martellamento delle prime musiche tribali. Solo molto più tardi parola e musica poterono scriversi in qualche modo e differenziarsi. Appare la poesia scritta, ma la comune parentela con la musica si fa sentire. La poesia tende a schiudersi in forme architettoniche, sorgono i metri, le strofe, le cosiddette forme chiuse” ([Poetry] is an entity about which very little is known . . . For my part, I consider poetry, materially speaking, to be born of the necessity to connect a vocal sound (the word) with the hammer beat of the earliest tribal music. Only later could words and music be somehow written down and differentiated. Written poetry appeared, but its common relationship with music made itself felt. Poetry began to emerge in architectonical forms; meters, strophes, the so-­ called closed forms arose). Eugenio Montale, “Is Poetry Still Possible?” The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale. ed. and trans. Jonathan Galassi (New York: The Ecco Press, 1982), 51. 92. The relationship between words and music has long been on the minds of Italian poets. In the thirteenth century, the Sicilian School distinguished itself from previous traditions by renouncing the musical accompaniment that had characterized, for instance, Provencal poetry. Less than a century later, Dante Alighieri described poetry as the union of music and rhetoric in his De Vulgari Eloquentia. At II, iv, 2, Dante affirms: “Si poesim recte consideremus: que nichil aliud est quam fictio rethorica musicaque posita” (If we understand poetry aright: that is, as nothing other than a ver-

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bal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music). Dante, De vulgari eloquentia (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), 64. Trans. from Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 93. In this idea, one can identify the influence of Schopenhauer, who discussed the vertical structure of music and its sense of repetition. In his analysis, Schopenhauer seems to ignore the necessary verticality of poetry and its musicality; nonetheless, he isolates the common structural elements of poetry and music. In his words: “How full of meaning and significance the language of music is we see from the repetition signs, as well as from the Da capo which would be intolerable in the case of works composed in the language of words. In music, however, they are very appropriate and beneficial; for to comprehend it fully, we must hear it twice.” Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 264. In this regard, it is worth mentioning Marjorie Perloff’s reference to Jacques Roubaud’s idea that the structural evidence of the melodic origins of lyric poetry lies in its visual representation. See Marjorie Perloff, The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 7. 94. Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1948). 95. Brown, Music and Literature, 15. 96. “Suddenly, at time, there comes/a moment when your inhuman heart,/ estranged from our, terrifies./Then your music clashes with mine. Your every movement is hostile.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 59. 97. Montale, Tutte le poesie, 60: “Had I the talent to match your voices/with my stammering speech—/I who once dreamed of acquiring/those saltsea words of yours/where nature fuses with art—” Trans. Arrowsmith, 63. Italics mine. 98. For more on Montale’s ideas on the unique relationship between words and music, see Loris Maria Marchetti, “‘Prima le parole, dopo la musica’: Montale ed Euterpe,” Lettere italiane 51 (1999): 651. On the history of opera as an ongoing negotiation—and at times a conflict—between music and words, see Ulrich Weisstein, ed., The Essence of Opera (New York: The Norton Library, 1964). In her introduction to a critical anthology of Italian opera librettos, Giovanna Gronda best summarized the focal points of this “negotiation,” tracing the evolving relationship between libretto and score throughout the history of opera. Ultimately, Gronda underscores the interconnectedness of the two. Most importantly, she historicizes the problem: every historical period of opera differed in its

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prioritizing of the libretto over the musical accompaniment, or vice versa. See the introduction to Paolo Fabbri and Giovanna Gronda, eds., Libretti d’opera italiani (Milan: Mondadori, 1997). Calvin Brown likewise weighs in on the synthesis of artistic forms in opera: “The primary difficulty is one of complication. In any sort of vocal music a struggle between the text and music is likely to ensue and, as we have already seen, a perfect combination of the two arts is a rarity. Opera has this difficulty plus a great many others. Acting and the dance must be included, along with the art of the set designer, scene-painter and costumer.” Brown, Music and Literature, 88. In “Intervista immaginaria,” Montale hints at an idea of unity among all arts, confirming the role that his musical education played in this process: “Ma non pubblicavo e non ero convinto di me. Ambizioni più concrete e più strane mi occupavano. Studiavo allora per debuttare nella parte di Valentino, nel Faust di Gounod; passai poi tutta la parte di Alfonso XII nella Favorita e quella di Lord Aston nella Lucia. L’esperienza, più che l’intuizione, della fondamentale unità delle varie arti dev’essere entrata in me anche da quella porta” (But I didn’t publish and wasn’t sure of myself. I had more concrete and stranger ambitions. At the time I was preparing for my debut as Valentin in Gounod’s Faust; then I studied the entire part of Alfonso XII in La Favorita and Lord Astor in Lucia. My experience, more than intuition, of the fundamental unity of the various arts must have come to me from that source), Montale, Sulla poesia, 562. Trans. Galassi, 296. Later in his life Montale responds to a question by Bruno Rossi about his experience with different artistic forms, affirming once again the fundamental unity of all art forms: “Sono convinto che tutte le arti hanno un fondo comune. È un errore separare categoricamente le arti, come fossero del tutto indipendenti tra loro” (I am convinced that all arts have common roots. It is a mistake to categorically separate them, as if they were completely independent of each other). Montale, Sulla poesia, 597. Rosita Tordi claims that the theoretical model behind this syncretistic ambition is Wagner, despite the aversion that Montale demonstrated toward the German composer in all his musical writings (31). 99. “Amo la cattiva musica, o meglio la musica che la frateria non sempre disinteressata degli specialisti o dei musicanti di professione proclama pubblicamente tale” (I love bad music or, rather, the kind of music that the biased friary of the specialists or the professional musicians publicly defines as such). Arte, musica, società, 384. 100. Assante, “Montale e la musica,” 8.

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References Primary Sources Alighieri, Dante. 1991. De vulgari eloquentia. Milan: Garzanti. ———. 1996. De vulgari eloquentia. Trans. Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montale, Eugenio. 1922. Accordi. Primo tempo: Prima serie 2: 37–41. ———. 1961. Farfalla di Dinard. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1976. Sulla poesia. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1980a. L’opera in versi, eds. Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore. ———. 1980b. Mottetti, ed. Dante Isella. Milan: Il Saggiatore. ———. 1981. Prime alla Scala, ed. Gianfranca Lavezzi. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, . ———. 1982a. “Words and Music.” Trans. Jonathan Galassi. Ploughshares 8 (1): 92–96. ———. 1982b. The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale, ed. and trans. Jonathan Galassi. New York: The Ecco Press. ———. 1984. Tutte le poesie, ed. Giorgio Zampa. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1996a. Il secondo mestiere: Arte, musica, società, ed. Giorgio Zampa. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1996b. Il secondo mestiere. Vol. 1. Prose (1920–1979). Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2009. Satura, ed. Riccardo Castellana. Milan: Mondadori. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1966. The World as Will and Representation. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications Inc.

Secondary Sources Abrams, Meyer Howard. 1957. The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor. Kenyon Review 19 (1): 113–130. Assante, Silvia Maria. 2016. Montale e la musica. «Quel regno di fuochi fatui e cartapesta». Ph.D. diss., Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. Aversano, Mario. 1984. Montale e il libretto d’opera. Naples: Editrice Ferraro. Bardazzi, Giovanni. 1988. Schopenhauer tra Montale e Sbarbaro. Studi Novecenteschi 15 (35): 63–107. Bertoni, Alberto, and Jonathan Sisco. 2003. Montale vs. Ungaretti: Introduzione alla lettura di due modelli di poesia del Novecento. Rome: Carocci. Biasin, Gian-Paolo. 1985. Il vento di Debussy. La poesia di Montale nella cultura del Novecento. Bologna: Il Mulino. Brown, Calvin S. 1948. Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.

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Contorbia, Franco. 1999. Montale, Genova, il modernismo e altri saggi montaliani. Bologna: Edizioni Pendragon. Forti, Marco. 1974. Eugenio Montale: La poesia, la prosa di fantasia e d’invenzione. Milan: Mursia. Gavazzeni, Gianandrea. 1968. Fra poesia e musica. Nuova rivista musicale 2: 1089–1091. ———. 1992. Il sipario rosso: Diario 1950–1976. Turin: Einaudi. Gazzola, Giuseppe. 2016. Montale, the Modernist. Florence: Olschki Editore. Gronda, Giovanna, and Paolo Fabbri, eds. 1997. Libretti d’opera italiani. Milan: Mondadori. Iovino, Roberto, and Stefano Verdino, eds. 1996. Montale, la musica e i musicisti. Genoa: Sagep Editrice. Lonardi, Gilberto. 1980. Il vecchio e il giovane e altri studi su Montale. Bologna: Zanichelli. ———. 2003. Il fiore dell’addio: Leonora, Manrico e altri fantasmi del melodramma nella poesia di Montale. Bologna: Il Mulino. Marchetti, Loris Maria. 1999. «Prima le Parole, dopo la Musica»: Montale ed Euterpe. Lettere Italiane 51: 649–656. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. 1966. Da D’Annunzio a Montale: ricerche sulla formazione e la storia del linguaggio poetico montaliano. In Ricerche sulla lingua poetica contemporanea. Padua: Circolo Filologico Linguistico Padovano. ———. 1971. Due agnizioni di lettura. Strumenti critici 15: 264–269. ———. 1975. Tradizione del Novecento: da D’Annunzio a Montale. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 1984. Montale critico musicale. Studi novecenteschi XI (28): 197–238. Orlando, Roberto. 1994. Il ‘razionalismo’ di Montale tra Bergson e Sestov. Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 24 (4): 973–1012. Perella, Nicolas James. 1979. Midday in Italian Literature: Variations of an Archetypal Theme. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Perloff, Marjorie, and Craig Dworkin, eds. 2009. The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Rossi, Luca Carlo. 2007. Montale e l’orrido repertorio operistico: presenze, echi, cronache del melodramma tra versi e prose. Bergamo: Sestante. Sanguineti, Edoardo. 1969. Poesia italiana del Novecento. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 1977. Forse un mattino andando. In Letture montaliane in occasione dell’80°compleanno del poeta, 49–52. Genoa: Bozzi. Schwartz, Arman, and Emanuele Senici, eds. 2017. Giacomo Puccini and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Spitzer, Leo. 1963. Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung”, ed. Anna Granville Hatcher. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Weaver, William. 1988. The Golden Century of Italian Opera from Rossini to Puccini. New York: Thames and Hudson. Weisstein, Ulrich, ed. 1964. The Essence of Opera. New York: The Norton Library. Zoboli, Paolo. 2015. Montale e Schopenhauer. Quaderni del “Cairoli” 29: 174–203.

CHAPTER 5

Heart of Darkness: Saba’s Operatic Eroticism

5.1   Opera and the Erotic When Umberto Saba disclosed that “Udite or tutti del mio cor gli affanni” from Verdi’s Ernani was his favorite verse in Italian literature, not only did he display his admiration for the opera’s music and Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto, but he also offered a significant insight into his own poetic vision. In the aria itself—“Mercé, diletti amici”—the title character, Ernani, stops the dramatic action and calls everyone’s attention to his romantic struggles. In a similar fashion, on the pages of Saba’s Canzoniere, the poet uses Ernani’s words to pause and linger on the multiform troubles of his own tormented heart. Much like Montale (as I discussed in the last chapter), Saba designates the heart as a central motif, one that crosses his poetic oeuvre and comes to symbolize the rift of his innermost soul, torn asunder by conflicting forces. But in Saba’s imagery, the heart is also a symbol for what he deems the most powerful of the human passions: erotic desire. Even before his discovery of psychoanalysis, the poet had articulated the idea that sexuality is the motive behind all human actions. The erotic is of course a double-edged sword, associated sometimes with pleasure but at other times with the pain of yearning and loss—hence the “affanni” (“woes”) of Saba’s favorite verse. Saba could have picked innumerable lines of poetry to express this same sentiment, but he instead chose to do so through opera. In Chap. 3, I showed how his operatic

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thematics was a language both to express his conflicted cultural identity and ultimately to reclaim an “Italianness” by rejecting D’Annunzian/ Wagnerian nationalism and embracing the complexities of his Triestine heritage. In this chapter, I will look at how opera is also his language for the erotic. My analysis will focus on the second book of the Canzoniere, which comprises poems written between 1922 and 1931, the most recognizable and celebrated phase of Saba’s poetry. The influence of opera here is found, on the first level, in the form of direct quotes from opera librettos, as well as images, motifs, and dramatic situations borrowed from opera and contributing fundamentally to the Canzoniere’s erotic motifs. The influence, however, was not merely textual: as outlined in Chap. 3, Saba also sought a theatrical mode of poetic expression, recalling iconic characters and situations from popular operas, always in an attempt to dramatize the conflicting aspects of his soul. With regard to the erotic, a cornerstone of this operatic “dramatization” will be the concept of non-resolution. The “fugues” of Saba’s Canzoniere (from Preludio e fughe, to which I will return in the conclusion of this chapter) are known for failing to come to a resolution, despite the fugue form’s being built around the escalation and resolution of tension.1 This lack of resolution, however, is precisely the point and offers an insight into the goals of Saba’s “musical” poetry. After reading Freud and undergoing psychoanalysis, Saba came to the conclusion that his poetic gift was dependent on not stifling his competing inner voices, not resolving the neuroses he believed to be the driving force behind his poetry.2 In his analysis of this non-resolution, Debenedetti suggests we look at Saba not as an aspiring musician, but as an aspiring playwright, one who makes his inner voices into characters, dramatis personae who are meant not to resolve their conflicts, but instead to simply give voice to them (thus giving voice to Saba’s own ambivalence in all things—national identity, sexuality, and poetic style). In this chapter, I concur with Debenedetti, but will add a crucial distinction: rather than theater characters, Saba makes his inner voices into characters from opera. This includes the fugues themselves, whose characters are operatic archetypes, and it extends to works I will examine from the Canzoniere’s second book (examples echoing especially Verdi, with all his implicit parallels to Wagner). My key point will be that opera, in Saba’s view, was especially suited to a thematics of “non-resolution,” not only since opera is populated by so many unreciprocated characters, but also because these characters were shared in the public consciousness. This publicness, when combined with the private monologue of poetry, allowed

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Saba to harmonize his personal suffering with the collective suffering of humanity, and in so doing to give expression to his inner voices in a way that outstripped any vain, libidinal hopes of “resolution.”

5.2   Eros and Thanatos George Bernard Shaw once famously said that opera is “when a tenor and a soprano want to make love but are prevented by a baritone.”3 Music critic Peter Conrad later expressed a similar sentiment in a more mythological language: “among opera’s pagan motive forces, none is more powerful or ever-present than the god (or goddess) of love. Operatic characters blame all their infractions on Eros.”4 Conrad identifies two character-­ archetypes that thrived throughout the history of the genre: Don Giovanni and Carmen, “the two most dangerous and scandalous operatic characters . . . for whom existence is an erotic career.”5 For Conrad, these two figures transcend any particular instantiation as dramatic characters—they are embodiments of the very spirit of opera. They symbolize the tension between the vitality of sex and the looming threat of death that is marked by passing time: the age-old dialectic of Eros and Thanatos, perhaps best articulated by the Liebestod motif that ends Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.6 This same dialectic is central to Saba’s poetry and often materializes in the form of opera. As I have shown, Saba revisited his marital crisis in Trieste e una donna (1910–1912), borrowing heavily from the operatic repertoire. In this section of the Canzoniere’s first volume, Saba immortalized his wife Lina as a powerful symbol of untamed erotic power, filtering her poetic persona through operatic characters and themes. In the poet’s imagination, Lina was a combination of Bizet’s Carmen and Verdi’s Maddalena (from Rigoletto), both agents of an indomitable sexual desire: in Lina’s “fiero, mutevole ardore,” there is the unmistakable echo of the Verdian “La donna è mobile.” I have already discussed how in the love triangle of Trieste e una donna, Saba himself plays the role of the cuckold, an archetypal erotic victim.7 The book’s final section, “Nuovi versi alla Lina,” highlights how Saba’s debt to opera goes beyond direct textual citation, also encompassing the theatricality that Debenedetti cited.8 A suite of 15 poems of varied lengths, “Nuovi versi alla Lina” effectively concludes the romantic sub-plot of Trieste e una donna, depicting the final reconciliation between Saba and his wife. Saba pointed to the musical aspirations of “Nuovi versi alla Lina” when he described its poems as “canzonettas” or “duets.” He calls the reader’s attention to the following stanzas:

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Dico: “Son vile...”; e tu: “Se m’ami tanto sia benedetta la nostra viltà” “... ma di baciarti non mi sento stanco.” “E chi si stanca di felicità?” Ti dico: “Lina, col nostro passato, amarci... adesso... quali oblii domanda!” Tu mi rispondi: “Al cuor non si comanda; e quel ch’è stato è stato.” Dico: “Chi sa se saprò perdonarmi; se mai poi ti vedrò quella di prima?” Dico: “In alto mi vuoi nella tua stima? Questo tu devi: amarmi.” (“Nuovi versi alla Lina—14,” 1–12).9

Not only does Saba depict his conflict with his wife as an exchange between two voices—a duet—but he also infuses it with a potent melodramatic tone and uses the two voices to shape a complex polyphony, an innovation in the Canzoniere, where most poems up to this point had been monophonic.10 The poem’s dialogic structure is signposted by the musical anaphora “Dico” / “Ti dico” / “Dico.” These two voices reflect Saba’s effort to harmonize his own opposing feelings of love and hatred for his wife, and (as I will show) anticipate a formula present elsewhere in the Canzoniere—most notably in the poems of Preludio e canzonette and Preludio e fughe. Furthermore, this passage highlights (as he himself states, using his “Carimandrei” pseudonym) the Verdian core of Saba’s operatic thematics.11 Well before reading Freud, Saba saw in Verdi’s operas the delicate balance of pleasure and suffering that is a hallmark of the erotic. Verdi would come to be fundamental to Saba’s understanding of how music could uniquely articulate the powerful sway that sexuality holds over human conduct. In a famous scorciatoia, the poet underscored the centrality of the erotic in Verdi’s art: VERDI È l’artista più genitale che conosca; tanto da non essere quasi più un artista. La maggiore beatitudine della sua musica è quella di possedere la donna amata; la peggiore sventura perdere un essere caro. Sono le sue eterne melodie di amore e di morte.12

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Saba here uses the adjective “genital” both literally and with all its fraught psychoanalytic connotation. He evokes not only the direct sexual impulses driving Verdi’s characters, but also the composer’s unique grasp of the more hidden motives of the human psyche. In Freud’s theories, the genital phase is a human being’s final stage of development, the transition to a more mature understanding of one’s own sexuality.13 For Saba, Eros and Thanatos are the two points that orient Verdi’s artistic vision (“le sue eterne melodie di amore e di morte”).14 He articulates this idea as a dialectic between the yearning to possess the beloved woman and the fear of losing her. The affinity that the poet found with Verdi throughout his career was centered on a sense of shared understanding of this dialectic. Saba saw the effort to express this dialectic and other aspects of the erotic as part of the artistic vocation. In Storia e cronistoria, Carimandrei/Saba refers to poets as “priests of Eros.”15 In the poem “La brama” (“Desire”), while contemplating the devastating impact of sexual desire on one’s life, he addresses “Desire” itself: “Other than you, what have I talked about / in the practice of my heart?” A subtle eroticism pervades the Canzoniere in its entirety, but it is in the second book that the erotic becomes especially prominent. This becomes most explicitly “visual” in sections like I prigioni—a sequence inspired by Michelangelo Buonarroti’s eponymous series of sculptures—and Fanciulle, a series of portraits of young girls inspired by Marcel Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919).16 The 15 sonnets of I prigioni portray male figures as allegories of human desire and vice: “Il lussurioso” (“The lustful”) portrays a young man haunted by an untamable lust. The poem was inspired by Michelangelo’s Dying Slave (1513), a marble sculpture originally designed for the tomb of Pope Julius II.17 Saba’s young lustful character speaks in the first person and confesses the torments of his soul, contrasting the sinful thoughts of his adult life with the innocence of his childhood. He describes the forbidden desire that haunts him as a dialectic relationship between good and evil (“Or tutto il bene e il male / in un pensiero che non dico chiuso,” 3–4). But acting on this lust—for him an intense and overpowering experience—is accompanied by a profound sense of guilt, followed by an allegorical corporal punishment: “al mio ardore mortale / il tronco è dato per castigo” (6–7). Fanciulle portrays a group of young girls who, like the inert figures of I prigioni, embody different psychological and moral qualities.18 The section’s first poem depicts an explicitly sexual scene: a young girl stands

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naked, held in a position that recalls the pose of the lustful “prisoner” in the previous section. Nude, hands tied behind her back, she awaits her “punishment”: Nuda in piedi, le mani dietro il dorso, come se in lacci strette tu gliele avessi. Erette le mammelle, che ben possono al morso come ai baci allettar. (“Fanciulle 1,” 1–5).19

The girl is objectified as a pure embodiment of sexual desire, a “promised pleasure,” which is “often paradise, / more often hell without escape!” (15–16). Here again, the erotic is portrayed as an encounter of opposites, a source of both pleasure and damnation. Several sources, both literary and philosophical, shaped Saba’s approach to the erotic. First, as I will discuss shortly, Leopardi’s ideas on sexuality had a profound impact on Saba’s imagination. More importantly, as others have documented, Saba’s eroticism shares important features with Freudianism, where the libido is seen as the unconscious force behind human actions. However, as already mentioned, Saba was introduced to Freud only in the late 1920s, after the completion of the second part of the Canzoniere. In describing Verdi as a “genital artist,” therefore, Saba adopts the psychoanalytic lexicon in hindsight.20 Saba’s erotic imagination was also shaped by his reading of Nietzsche, whom he first encountered during World War I.  As I have discussed, Saba regarded the philosopher as an “almost complete sublimation of Eros.”21 In this sense, Nietzsche was an unconscious precursor to Freud, and when Saba calls Verdi “more than an artist” he echoes his own reference to Nietzsche as “more than a philosopher.”22 Beyond his art, that is, Verdi was a psychoanalyst avant la lettre. To fully appreciate the profound impact of Freud and Nietzsche on Saba’s erotic thematics, one must take into account an influence that preceded his encounters with these thinkers—that of the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger. Luperini has traced Saba’s interest in Weininger to his reading of the latter’s Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter, 1903),23 a book acknowledged by many as a precursor to Freud and an important influence on Italian culture, especially in the intellectual circle orbiting the periodical La voce.24 Weininger’s misogyny left a deep mark

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on Saba’s early ideas about women (something witnessed in his portrayal of Lina) and likely influenced his covert allusions to his alleged homosexuality. Weininger argues that each human being comprises both a feminine and a masculine side: the balance of these two components determines one’s sexual identity and orientation.25 One can easily recognize here the foundations of Saba’s conception of sexuality as a struggle between opposite extremes. Fausto Curi traces the melodramatic excesses of a number of Saba’s poems—including Nuovi versi alla Lina—to the poet’s reading of Weininger’s divisive book.26 Curi does not expand on this idea further, but a closer inspection of Saba’s operatic allusions will show that the poet’s love of opera and his engagement with Weininger fused into a pervasive fascination with erotic extremes.

5.3   Love, Libido, Don Juan In opera, Saba found a medium where the centrality of sex in human life could be observed in great focus. In “La malinconia amorosa” (“The Pathos of Love”), an impressionistic meditation on erotic desire, Saba investigates the effects of passion on the human psyche, anticipating a theme he will later explore more deeply in “La brama” and other poems of Cuor morituro. Saba describes the erotic fantasies of two young boys: a Store Clerk who longs for all the beautiful girls that visit his store and a Dreamer who believes that love is an exclusively rational experience, one he wishes to tame and restrain with his intellect.27 The two characters are consumed by different extremes of what Saba calls “malinconia amorosa” (“romantic melancholia”), the Clerk symbolizing the “active life” and the Dreamer representing the “contemplative life.” The specter of “Desire” is an equally haunting presence for both. Each of the poem’s three stanzas is introduced by the anaphora “Malinconia amorosa,” which reinforces the lilting musicality already established by the rhyme scheme (ABBCCADD): Malinconia amorosa del nostro cuore, come una cura secreta o un fervore solitario, più sempre intima e cara; per te un dolce pensiero ad un’amara rimembranza si sposa; discaccia il tedio che dentro ristagna,

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e poi tutta la vita t’accompagna. (“Malinconia amorosa,” 1–8).28

Saba underscores the centrality of the erotic by concluding that the pathos of love is the “first wound of [his] heart and last” (27). Saba draws here from his literary background—the character of the dreamer is said to be inspired by the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights. But there is also an operatic element: Claudio Milanini, in his remarks on the first edition of Coi miei occhi (1912)—the first incarnation of Trieste e una donna— identified an echo of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto for Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the lines “un’amara / rimembranza si sposa” (“a sweet thought / marries a bitter memory”)29: Il padre lascia, o cara, la rimembranza amara: hai sposo e padre in me. (Don Giovanni I.4).30

In the first scenes of Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni is forced to flee after having murdered the Commendatore, who had tried to prevent the former from seducing his daughter, Donna Anna. When Anna is left alone to mourn her father, her fiancé Don Ottavio attempts to console her, begging her to let go of her hatred and desire for revenge. Don Ottavio urges Anna to overcome the bitter memory by finally marrying him. Saba’s echo of this opera (which Lonardi also notes)31 resonates deeply with the central themes of “La malinconia amorosa.” Mozart and Da Ponte’s is the most famous incarnation of Don Juan, the archetypal libertine first portrayed by Tirso de Molina in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, 1630). But Don Juan/ Giovanni is more than a fictional anti-hero: over the centuries he has become a widely known erotic symbol with complex moral implications. In a section of Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or—“The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic”—the Danish philosopher (writing as “Victor Eremita”) claims that Mozart’s Don Giovanni stands at the pinnacle of artistic achievement,32 an embodiment not merely of the erotic but of music itself, and in this way the opera’s protagonist becomes the figurehead of the first of Kierkegaard’s four spheres of ethical progression: the “aesthetic” sphere.33

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Other references to opera librettos punctuate Saba’s Canzoniere and resonate with his conflicted understanding of sexuality. The section most dense with operatic allusions is Cuor morituro, which occupies a central position in the overall Canzoniere and represents the thematic pivot of its second book. Cuor morituro spans over ten years of Saba’s life and contains some of his most anthologized poems (including the Il trovatore-­ inspired “Eleonora,” discussed in Chap. 3). These poems’ eroticism revolves around the concept of brama—“libido” in psychoanalytic language—which Saba sees as a powerful force living in and moving through human beings, a source of both pleasure and damnation. He elaborates brama in particular in “Il canto dell’amore,” “Eros,” “Eleonora,” and “La brama,” where he defines desire as the “causa / tu del mio male, ed anche, / si del mio bene” (73–75).34 Lust is thus a binary force that propels all human actions: “per te ora vedo / gente andare e venire, / alte navi partire, / del vasto mondo farsi sola una cosa” (75–79).35 This poem shows both Weininger’s influence and the foreshadowing of Freud’s theories, casting desire as a disruptive force that “accompanies man from his birth to his death, giving him no rest or respite.”36 Elsewhere Saba indicates the intellectual roots of this poem: Leopardi’s “Il pensiero dominante” (1834) and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1864), the same opera that shaped D’Annunzio’s erotic imagery in Il trionfo della morte (1894).37 The influence of “Il pensiero dominante” (the first episode of the so-called “Cycle of Aspasia”) is both formal and thematic.38 Formally, Saba replicates the free structure of Leopardi’s canzone, as well as some of Leopardi’s rhetorical strategies. Saba’s “Altro che te che ho detto / io nei modi dell’arte, che ho nascosto / altro che te, o svelato?” (“La brama” 40–42)39 echoes Leopardi’s “Di tua natura arcana / Chi non favella? Il suo poter fra noi / Chi non sentì?”40 Thematically, Saba mirrors Leopardi’s portrayal of desire as an ambivalent drive: “Terribile, ma caro / Dono del cielo” (“Il pensiero dominante” 3–4).41 In Leopardi’s poetry desire presides over all human actions, and all other human illusions have to submit to the supremacy of love: “Solo un affetto / vive tra noi: quest’uno, / prepotente signore, / dieder l’umane leggi all’uman core” (76–79).42 The Leopardian poet-figure himself succumbs to its power—“Che divenute son, fuor di te solo, / tutte l’opre terrene, / tutt’intera la vita al guardo mio!” (21–23)43—and every other human passion becomes insignificant. Love reveals itself to Leopardi as both intensely personal and also shared by humanity, a paradox that Saba recuperates and reworks in “La brama.”

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While Leopardi’s influence on “La brama” is overt, Wagner’s impact is more subtly woven into the poem’s fabric. I have already argued that Saba’s conflicted stance on the German composer was an outward manifestation of the poet’s interior clash between the German and Italian identities of Trieste. Wagner’s presence in Saba’s poetry, however, goes beyond questions of nationality. While the poet attacked Wagner’s nationalism, the latter’s opera nonetheless continued to play a significant (even if sporadic) role in Saba’s poetry. “La brama” provides the best example. Saba himself revealed that the poem’s central image was inspired by the third act of Tristan und Isolde. In this act’s opening scene, Tristan, after his duel with Melot, lies wounded in his bed, hoping to meet with Isolde in the realm of night and death. Instead, however, he wakes up in the Brittany castle where he began his quest and voices his disappointment at finding himself still in the kingdom of daylight and life, still haunted by earthly desires. Saba translates this idea into the following image: E fuor del suo letto, già profanato, nel disgusto balza, e nell’orrore di sé stesso, il fiero giovanetto, che in cuore una vergogna preme poi, com’è lungo il dì, e un rimorso. (“La brama,” 23–27).44

Wagner’s presence goes beyond this echo.45 D’Annunzio, in the final chapter of Il trionfo della morte, echoed Tristan und Isolde’s theme of death as the only true fulfillment of the lovers’ affair. This point strongly influenced Saba, who turned it into a pervasive theme of the unresolvability of erotic torment. This theme defied the goal of psychoanalysis—the resolution of libido-created neuroses—and spoke instead to Saba’s affinity for the pre-Freudian philosophy of Schopenhauer, priest of the eternal dialectic of Eros and Thanatos,46 whose philosophy was, for Saba, always operatic.47 In the poem “Eros,” Saba dramatizes the genesis of unresolvable desire through the story of a young boy’s discovery of sexuality. In Storia e cronistoria, Saba tells us that “Eros” was composed at the same time as “Il piccolo Berto” (1929–1931), one of the most vividly autobiographical representations of the poet’s adolescence and one of his most explicitly psychoanalytic works.48 He indicates a connection between the boy portrayed in “Eros” and Berto, a recurring alter ego for the poet himself as a boy. The poem is set in a small film theater, where at the end of an afternoon screening a

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woman exhibits herself in a burlesque performance. In the last row of seats, a young boy admires the woman in awe, suddenly filled with a powerful feeling he cannot identify. He wonders: “È fascino? È disgusto? È l’una e l’altra / cosa? Chi sa? Forse a sua madre pensa, / pensa se questo è l’amore” (“Eros,” 8–10).49 The scene is portrayed with a narrative tone that echoes the impressionism and vividness of Trieste e una donna. In the last four lines, the poem explodes in a liberating moment of musicality and lightness, marking the resolution of the poet’s inner conflict: Solo ascolta la musica, leggera. musichetta da trivio, anche a me cara talvolta, che per lui si è fatta, dentro l’anima sua popolana ed altera,50 una marcia guerriera. (“Eros,” 13–17).51

The boy tries to make sense of the profound unsettledness he feels for the first time. At first, he is bewitched and dazed by the young woman; he diverts his gaze from her, focusing on the trivial music that accompanies her spectacle, trying to distract himself but finally succumbing to her power. The unbearable force of his sexual attraction at first clashes with the lightness of the music, but this music soon becomes an extension of the woman’s ineluctable hold, thus becoming the accompaniment to the young boy’s nascent erotic desire. Saba stresses a further link between the erotic and music, a Schopenhauerian connection that draws here on the poet’s operatic memory. In the passage above, we can hear in the adjective “altera” an echo of one of the best-known arias of La traviata (1853), Saba’s favorite work by Verdi. In the opera’s first act the protagonist, Alfredo, confesses his love to the doomed heroine Violetta with the famous “Un dì, felice, eterea”: Di quell’amor, quell’amor ch’è palpito Dell’universo, dell’universo intero, Misterioso, Misterioso altero, Croce, croce e delizia, Croce e delizia, delizia al cor. (La traviata, I.5).52

The language Alfredo uses to describe love—both mysterious and proud, both a torture and a delight—places it on the cosmic scale and

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evokes the Schopenhauerian duality of pleasure and pain. The Verdian references reach a peak in Saba’s Canzoniere with “Eleonora,” discussed in Chap. 3. In this poem, the speaker finds himself alone in a bar, drinking and feeling the weight of an existential grief. At a certain point, he claims to have found peace, not through the alleviation of his pain, but through the acknowledgment that this suffering, somehow, could give solace to the rest of humanity. In this rush of compassion—a feeling of suffering with and for others—Saba reiterates the verse that he wished he had stolen from D’Annunzio, a verse that is about taking on the world’s suffering: “pianse ed amò per tutti.”53 But in “Eleonora,” the poet’s epiphany is prompted by a show of compassion toward him by another, the young waitress named in the title: Un uomo in agonia hai confortato tu. Non ti scordar questo mai più questo, Eleonora mia. (“Eleonora,” 69–72).54

The poem is dense with Verdian undertones. First, the line “non ti scordare questo mai più” is a near-direct quote from the third act of Il trovatore.55 In the scene, Manrico, imprisoned in a tower and awaiting his execution, sings a farewell to his beloved Leonora (after whom Saba confirmed that “Eleonora” is based)56—the plot of Il trovatore is based on Manrico’s feud with his brother, the Count of Luna, over the love of Leonora. Second, the theme of suffering, central in this poem, can be read through a Verdian lens as well. Musicologist Massimo Mila has argued that for Verdi’s characters the experience of pain is fundamental to acquiring humanity.57 It is a point Saba clearly identified with—for him the petty jealousies of an operatic love triangle, just like his encounter with a sympathetic waitress, are not trivial human stories but representations of the lived tension between Eros and Thanatos.58 Although much of Saba’s operatic thematics comes in the form of these open allusions and quotations of librettos,59 as with Montale the influence goes much deeper. Among the poets of his era, Saba was likely the most mindful and responsive to the tradition of lyric poetry that preceded him, and it is this tradition’s close bonds with music (based on principles of both rhythm and euphony) that make Saba’s special connection to opera possible. In the second book of the Canzoniere, Saba draws attention to his own efforts to imitate musical forms, laboring to frame his poetic voice

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within precise metrical coordinates. This stage of his poetry—one that would become the most noted of his career60—is indeed bookended by the two most overtly musical selections of his oeuvre: Preludio e canzonette (1922–1923) and Preludio e fughe (1928–1929).

5.4   Preludes, Canzonettas, and Fugues Saba composed Preludio e canzonette in 1922. The collection’s title plays on the ambiguity of the term “canzonetta,” which originally denoted a genre of secular vocal music that emerged in the late sixteenth century. The canzonetta fused the madrigal and the “villanella,” a form of three-­ voice composition originating around Naples. Among the composers who experimented with the canzonetta was Claudio Monteverdi, one of the founding fathers of Italian opera. But “canzonetta” is also a colloquial term for a popular song, one with no pretense to artistic refinement. It is for this ambivalence that Saba uses the term, on the one hand connecting his work to the grand tradition of Italian music, on the other underscoring the humble and inclusive inflection of his work. The collection’s 12 poems are centered on a female character named Chiaretta, senhal for the clarity (“chiarezza” in Italian) that the poet sought in his poetry. But although Chiaretta becomes a key love-object in Saba’s works,61 Preludio e canzonette should not be read as a “canzoniere d’amore” like Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta or Montale’s Le occasioni. Rather, these poems articulate a path of emotional growth within the poet’s soul, one that stretches from the existential pain of the first “canzonetta” to the liberating happiness of the conclusion. Saba summarizes in “Finale”: “Sono partito da Malinconia / e giunto a beatitudine per via” (17–18).62 Preludio e canzonette dramatizes a process of self-­ liberation and healing, a purifying path in which the narrator sublimates an existential suffering that is counterpoised to the vitality symbolized by Chiaretta. The girl offers consolation to the poet, but it is a temporary solace that is constantly menaced by the relentless flight of time, the inevitable, looming presence of death. Only artistic creation seems to offer the possibility of a resolution: l’arte mi giova; fare in me di molte e sparse cose una sola e bella. E d’ogni male mi guarisce un bel verso. (“Finale,” 11–14).63

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At the center of the collection is the motif of the heart, symbolizing the conflict within the poet’s soul, but also more generally embodying the unresolvability of his amorous passions. Saba opens the “Prelude,” entitled “Il canto di un mattino” (“The Morning Song”), by addressing his heart, evoking a musical metaphor: “Da te, cuor mio, l’ultimo canto aspetto, / e mi diletto a pensarlo fra me.”64 The song that he waits for his (private) heart to deliver comes instead in the form of a memory of a (public) performance. The poet recalls a morning when he found himself dreamily listening to a young sailor singing a love song while preparing his boat. The song is indeed a “canzonetta”: E l’udivo cantare, per se stesso, ma sì che la città n’era intenta, ed i colli e la marina, e sopra tutte le cose il mio cuore. (“Il canto di un mattino,” 9–12).65

The man sings to himself, unaware of his audience, but his words reach out both to the whole of the city and into the depths of the poet’s heart: it is a quintessentially Sabian image, a private moment turned into a collective emotion. This “collectivity” is emphasized by the fact that the sailor sings a popular song. This “canzonetta” (“Meglio—cantava—dire addio all’amore, / se nell’amor non è felicità . . . Così, piccina mia, così non va”) was a well-known love song in Saba’s youth. Entitled “Cara piccina,” it was originally recorded by the Italian singer Carlo Buti in 1917. In Storia e cronistoria Saba explains that he was struck in particular by the literary quality of this song, which he compares to a poem, admitting that the “popular muse” (meaning popular music) was one of his sources of inspiration.66 Saba admired this song not only for its easy balance of honesty and simplicity, but also because of its oscillation between happiness and melancholy, in which Saba saw the Nietzschean maxim that only those who have suffered greatly can enjoy true happiness. Saba made this idea central to his own poetry and “Il canto di un mattino” exemplifies why he saw popular music as the best vehicle for existential reflection. He finds something authentic in the contrast between this music’s glossy, frivolous surface and underlying human pain, on which he meditates while listening to the sailor: Ma in quel chiaro mattino altro ammoniva quella voce; e questo lo sai tu, cuore mio, che strane cose

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ti chiedevi ascoltando: or se lontana andrà la nave, or se la pena vana, non fosse, ed una colpa il mio esser mesto. (“Il canto di un mattino,” 26–31).67

As the song fades into the distance, that moment in time is relegated to the poet’s memory, but the existential questions it posed all linger in the poems that follow. “La malinconia” (“Melancholy”), for instance, examines the sadness that periodically paralyzed Saba throughout his life: Malinconia, la vita mia struggi terribilmente; e non v’è al mondo, non v’è al mondo niente che mi divaghi. (“La malinconia,” 1–5).68

“Malinconia” (melancholy) is another key word in Saba’s poetic imagination. “La malinconia” itself reiterates the “pathos of love” that in “Malinconia amorosa” Saba sublimated through his echoes of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. While the erotic is not the central theme of “La malinconia,” it is present in the guise of a young girl—implicitly Chiaretta—who catches the poet’s attention when she enters the room (“in your scanty clothes / you enter and distract me,” 9–10). Eros here is not a source of suffering, but a distraction from pain, a divertissement. This temporary escape from existential suffering is threatened, however, by the looming awareness of death. No pleasure is given, in Saba’s universe, without its opposite. This theme continues through to the following poem, “Il dolore,” a contiguity that is reinforced by the two poems’ identical metrical structure—eight short stanzas of five lines each, with an AABBC DDEEC rhyming pattern. Both canzonettas portray melancholy not merely as a feeling, but as an existential condition, a malady where constant reminders of one’s mortality dampen even fleeting moments of pleasure. While adhering to a rigorous metrical structure, the canzonettas that follow drift toward a more narrative tone and impressionistic style. Saba imposes a faster pace, crafting shorter stanzas and connecting them through even tighter rhyming schemes. He brings the character of Chiaretta to the fore, establishing her as a symbol of renewal upon which the poet’s path of emotional growth seems to hinge. In “Chiaretta in villeggiatura” (“Chiaretta on Vacation”), he portrays a day trip in the

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company of the young girl and her sister. The poem is structured in triplets, with an AAB BBC CDD rhyming scheme. Here Chiaretta is a symbol of untamed eroticism: in the opening stanza, the poet’s younger self watches her playing alone in a field, a waking vision of a pastoral nymph69: Con che ingenua malizia là, bambina, or bocconi giacevi, ora supina. ... quanto scoprivi agli occhi miei beati giù rotolante per gli erbosi prati. (“Chiaretta in villeggiatura,” 7–12).70

The poet stands “quietly, / basking in the glimpses of [her] beauty” (17–18), while his desire mounts. The bucolic begins to morph into more open arousal: Assai, bella Chiaretta, assai godere si può con gli occhi, ma più dolce è avere chi s’ama, solo a solo. (“Chiaretta in villeggiatura,” 25–27).71

The sexual tension finally peaks and is consummated: Dietro un muricciolo per man ti trassi, e sulla bocca ardente ti baciai sì lungamente. (“Chiaretta in villeggiatura,” 28–30).72

As I have stressed, in Saba’s Canzoniere—and in this section in particular—the description of pleasure is always accompanied by its opposite, pain, and the enjoyment of erotic pleasure is always contrasted with a looming sense of doom. The actions of the poet’s lascivious persona are, in fact, tainted by guilt: Chiaretta reproaches him for the kiss—“Da te udivo rimbrotti: ‘Osar qui tanto?’” (36)73—and when the two rejoin their party, everyone stares at them accusingly: “Ira e dolore pareva in molti” (42).74 A central theme of Preludio e canzonette is the role of artistic creation in human life, a concern symbolized by the engraver in “L’incisore” (“The Engraver”). This man, yet another alter ego for Saba, encapsulates the poet’s ideas on writing and, more broadly, on human creativity. Saba here

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describes the act of creating art as pure happiness: “Mi sogno io qualche volta / di fare antiche stampe: / è la felicità” (“I dream sometimes / of making antique prints. / It is happiness,” 1–3). This poem represents a corollary to Saba’s manifesto of poetic honesty, “Quello che resta da fare ai poeti” (which I discussed in Chap. 3): Io guardo il vero, e calco qual è dolce la vita, con qualche cosa ancora, che dice: guarda e adora; guarda se il mondo è bello, se il tuo dolor non vale. (“L’incisore,” 28–33).75

In the pieces the engraver creates, he is able to overcome the human sense of defeat by the haunting futility of life, sublimating this pain into his work and thus embodying the beauty of the world. The metrical architecture of “Preludio e canzonette” points to Saba’s aim of containing the contrasting forces of his inner life within precise forms.76 Debenedetti, in his analysis of Saba’s poetry, claims that Saba repeatedly privileged rhythm over melody.77 In particular, the second stage of Saba’s poetry centered on rhythmical and rhetorical strategies that work to accomplish a distinctive “cantabilità” (“singability”).78 Sergio Solmi agrees that rhythm often dominates Saba’s work, but argues that this does more than merely bring about a particular style. Solmi contends that Saba’s foregrounding of rhythm has the effect of pushing words out of their semantic roles (signs signifying things), thereby making them into sound units,79 where their value lies in their connection to other words (sounds pointing to sounds—their “relational” value, in the terminology of Roland Barthes, which Debenedetti himself had applied to Saba).80 Cuor morituro, the central section of the Canzoniere’s second book, marks an evolution in the poet’s style, which veers toward a more articulate language less dependent on rigorous metrical schemes, anticipating the style that will define Parole and the third book of the Canzoniere. Regardless of these changes, music continues to play a central role, both as an overt theme and as a figurative vehicle. And the continuity with Preludio e canzonette is clear from the opening poem, “Canzonetta nuova,” which briefly revisits the carefully organized metrical architecture

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of Saba’s earlier work. Here short quatrains of four quinari (five-syllable verses, with stress on the fourth syllable) are organized around an ABBCADDC rhyming pattern: Or che si tace – sia per brev’ora – quanto m’accora in me, nel mondo; ed alla pace che m’ha beato è il cuore grato quanto è profondo. (“Canzonetta nuova,” 1–8).81

The poem depicts a moment of acute personal crisis, reproducing the path of resurrection from mental pain that the poet had experienced in his own life (namely, his emotional breakdowns in 1924 and 1926).82 The poem reprises the principal themes and images of the previous section, including the motif of the heart as a symbol of the poet’s inner struggles, and of his sense that his creativity depends on these struggles. Saba diffuses his private tragedy into the fast-paced rhythmical musicality of this poem, as if seeking enough momentum to overcome his existential sorrow: Fò di due mali un sommo bene; fra tante pene non dico: Io fui. (“Canzonetta nuova,” 109–12).83

Saba’s ultimate ambition to fuse music and verse will be achieved, however, not with his canzonette but with his Preludio e fughe, the conclusion of the Canzoniere’s second book. Consisting of 12 carefully ordered poems—framed by the prelude and a two-part conclusion—Preludio e fughe adheres to a strict rhythmical structure inspired by the Violin Sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. In Storia e cronistoria Saba explains the background of this concept: in his youth he had hoped to become a violinist, but lacked the talent to play music professionally, a fate he shared, of course, with D’Annunzio and Montale. Saba recounts how later in his life, influenced by a nephew, he

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bought a small piano and attempted to play, among other works, Bach’s Violin Sonata.84 The poems of Preludio e fughe mirror Saba’s attempt to play the piece for violin on the piano: by transferring his musical ambition to a new “instrument” (the medium of poetry), Saba finds a way to fulfill his childhood desire to become a musician. Saba’s choice of a musical model is an ambitious one. Calvin Brown calls the fugue the most “intellectual” of all musical forms and one of the most difficult to reproduce in writing: it is, by definition, multi-voiced, whereas literature has strong roots in monody.85 The term “fugue” has been in use since the fourteenth century, originally indicating a composition technique for two-voice imitative counterpoint. It eventually became a name for compositions themselves, with Bach’s Fugues representing the canonical exemplars. In a typical fugue, a series of voices respond to each other in a characteristic three-movement pattern: introduction of the theme, development, and conclusion.86 Brown argues that the fugue, because of the pleasing regularity of its form, is among the most “satisfying” forms of art, both emotionally and intellectually.87 Because of its contrapuntal anatomy, the fugue is especially effective in building up lyrical tension: this is the effect that Saba’s poetic fugues aim to capture. The result is the most lyrical and intimate sequence of compositions in the Canzoniere. Saba translates the polyphony of the musical fugue into a dialogue of contrasting voices, usually of two or three characters, each voice articulating a distinct motif, usually with a specific verse or a stark poetic image. In all 12 dialogues, Saba remains faithful to the basic characteristics of the musical form. The prelude opens the sequence with a vatic invocation of the muses: Oh, ritornate a me voci d’un tempo, care voci discordi! Chi sa che in nuovi dolcissimi accordi io non vi faccia risuonare ancora? (“Preludio,” 1–4).88

The identity of the “discordant voices” in Preludio e fughe remains an open question.89 In an earlier sonnet, from the section called Autobiografia, the poet hints at a possible meaning, where the two colliding voices are those of his parents: “Come i parenti mi han dato due vite, / e di fonderle in una io fui capace” (“As my parents gave me two lives, / and I could fuse them into one,” 14–15). Saba again describes a painful truth,

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this universal human collision (“eran due razze in antica tenzone”), as inherent to his creative vision. It is a vision of reconciling these two sides, but for the vision to be sustained the two sides must never arrive at that reconciliation–they must remain “discordant” for Saba’s poetry to produce its harmonies. Saba’s “Preludio” foreshadows how the fugues that follow will be engaged in this paradoxical process of reconciliation and non-reconciliation: In pace vi componete negli estremi accordi, voci invano discordi. La luce e l’ombra, la gioia e il dolore s’amano in voi. (“Preludio,” 16–20).90

While Saba titled many of his poems with musical names, it is Preludio e fughe that is most closely modeled after a musical form. As already mentioned in my analysis of Montale’s Accordi, the Italian noun “accordo” and the verb “accordare”—to harmonize or reconcile—stem from the noun “cuore.” However, whereas Montale seeks to highlight the discord between himself and the outer world, Saba dramatizes the fracture within his own soul, where his heart becomes a poetic representation of what he understands (through his engagement with Freudianism) as an artistically productive neurosis.91 In the second “Congedo,” Saba clarifies the symbolism of the heart motif and underscores its centrality in this section. The core image here echoes the closing poem of Preludio e canzonette: O mio cuore dal nascere in due scisso, quante pene durai per uno farne! Quante rose a nascondere un abisso! (“Secondo congedo,” 1–3).92

As I summarized in Chap. 3, scholars have debated the extent of Saba’s musical aspirations, disagreeing over whether the poet intended to actually recreate musical structures in his poetry or used music only as a metaphor. The issue comes to a head in the case of Saba’s Fugues, with scholars debating whether he was simply inspired by musical fugues, or whether he sought to translate the fugue’s polyphony and counterpoint into a poetic

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frame.93 Debenedetti, however, offers an alternative perspective, emphasizing the dramaturgical aspects of Preludio e fughe (as I introduced at the beginning of this chapter). In Debenedetti’s view, Saba does not seek to create a new form of music, nor does he mean merely to evoke the idea of music, but rather he aspires to “dramatize” the conflict inherent in a musical form (the fugue) by means of conflicting poetic voices. Saba thus succeeds—with characters like Chiaretta, Berto, and the “discordant voices” of his parents—in using a musical model to give expression to the inner conflicts that ruled his emotional life, making these conflicts into dramatis personae with the distinctiveness of different musical melodies within one song. In this way the form of the fugue allows him to bring to full fruition the dramatic strategies that I outlined in my analysis of Trieste e donna. “Fuga a 3 voci” (“Fugue in 3 Voices,” the sixth and central poem of Preludio e fughe) is generally held to be one of Saba’s greatest poetic accomplishments. In Storia e cronistoria, Saba described it as his best poem,94 proudly reporting the opinion of his friend, the poet Quarantotti Gambini, who had cited its Verdian qualities. Philosopher Tullio Mogno went so far as to compare it to the polyphony of Dante’s Paradiso.95 Without doubt, “Fuga” is one of the most remarkably architected poems of Saba’s oeuvre. As Saba-Carimandrei explains, the “vast Canto has seven reprises; that is, the three voices resume their discourse seven times, each time varying their ‘theme’.”96 The theme is the line “Io non so più dolce cosa” (“I don’t know anything sweeter than this”), where the adjective “dolce” (sweet) is changed with each reiteration. Each refrain consists of four regular quatrains of four ottonari—octosyllabic lines, with tonic stress on the seventh syllable—a meter known for its rhythmic qualities and easy musicality.97 While in Saba’s other “fugues” the two voices reproduce the conflict between different aspects of his own soul, the presence of three voices in this fugue is more problematic, open to interpretation in terms of both the voices’ identities and their symbolic values. Saba-Carimandrei explains, however, that these three voices are again diffractions of his own personality: his conflicting attitudes on life, the inner turmoil that tears at his soul.98 Debenedetti outlines these three diffractions: the flamboyant womanizer, who represents a joyful openness toward life (vv. 1–16); the bashful lover, who considers love a mere product of the mind and who represents a secretive reclusiveness and self-­ reflectiveness (vv. 17–32); and a “female Narcissus” (vv. 33–48), whose beatitude resides in self-contemplation. One can recognize in the first two characters the figures from “La malinconia amorosa” who embody

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opposing concepts of love (the Store Clerk who fantasizes about the girls in his shop, and the Dreamer, who rationalizes his instincts and seeks to tame them). But it is the third voice of “Fuga a 3 voci,” the female Narcissus, that makes the poem unique. Some critics, reports Debenedetti, interpret this figure as an embodiment of “pure poetry” (with which Debenedetti disagrees).99 Immune to the courtship of the other two, she is at peace and contented within herself. This peace cancels out the tension of the standard two-voice conflict, bringing all three voices into a state of perfect balance. Whereas with two voices, reconciliation was a deliberately unattainable goal for Saba, the addition of a third represents the transcendence of the very search for resolution—an acceptance, in other words, of the ambivalence that marked every aspect of Saba (religious, sexual, and cultural/political). Debenedetti sees the first voice, Saba’s libertine, as yet another variation on the Don Giovanni archetype that appears so frequently in Saba’s poems.100 The libertine rhapsodizes about the joys of the erotic, giving voice to unabashed lust: Io non so più dolce cosa dell’amore in giovanezza, di due amanti in lieta ebbrezza di cui l’un nell’altro muore. In non so più gran dolore ch’esser privo di quel bene, e non porto altre catene di due braccia ignude bianche. (“Sesta fuga [a 3 voci],” 1–8).101

Upon closer inspection, this gleeful praise of romantic love can be read as a reiteration of the Verdian “genitalità” cited by Saba in the “scorciatoia” that I previously discussed (“Verdi è l’artista più genitale che conosca; tanto da non essere quasi più un artista...”). The libertine seems to offer a rendition of those “melodies of love and death” that Saba heard in Verdi,102 for whom the greatest beatitude was to possess the loved one (“due amanti in lieta ebbrezza / di cui l’un nell’altro muore”) and the greatest curse was to be deprived of a dear one (“esser privo di quel bene”). It is not incidental that Verdian eroticism penetrates this fugue in the guise of yet another libertine, a tragic hero for whom sensual love is both

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pleasure and torment (“croce e delizia,” Eros and Thanatos). In the second book of the Canzoniere, Saba has presented several variations on the libertine character from the operatic repertoire: he has transfigured his biographical struggles through the actions of Tristan and Isolde, Carmen and Maddalena, and the Duke of Mantua and Don Giovanni himself. All these characters share a common destiny: over-brimming eroticism that leads to death (their own or that of another person).103 The libertine of “Fuga a tre voci” unites these stories into one abstraction, nameless but striking an eminently familiar tone, like a musical motif. But unlike his operatic models, this libertine does not find satisfaction or death. Rather (helped by the presence of the “female Narcissus”), he finds expression. “Fuga a tre voci” seems to translate literally George Bernard Shaw’s operatic love triangle, but it transforms it into a perpetual Schopenhauerian chase or a Nietzschean eternal return of desire and conflict, where resolution is neither found nor even sought.

Notes 1. Whereas Calvin Brown sees a non-resolving fugue as a failure, Debenedetti sees it as the very objective of Saba’s “Fughe.” Debenedetti, Poesia italiana del Novecento, 130. 2. In response to Benedetto Croce, Saba articulates his point in the essay “Poesia, filosofia, psicanalisi,” Tutte le prose, 964–973. Saba writes: “Poesia e psicanalisi sono fra di loro quasi incompatibili. Una persona che, attraverso un’esperienza psicanalitica condotta fino in fondo e completamente riuscita, avesse superati in sé stessa tutti i propri ‘complessi’ e, con quelli, la propria infanzia, non scriverebbe più poesie” (Poetry and psychoanalysis are almost incompatible with each other. A person who, through a complete and successful psychoanalytic therapy, had overcome all his own complexes and, along with them, fully understood his own childhood, would no longer write poems). Saba, Tutte le prose, 966. Mario Lavagetto, in analyzing this phase of Saba’s poetry, reflects on the poet’s encounter with psychoanalysis, which corresponds to a radical shift. In the long poem “Il piccolo Berto,” placed in the Canzoniere right after Preludio e fughe, Saba reconnected to his childhood traumas before finally being able to move on to the next phase of his poetry, in which he abandoned the closed metrical forms that up to that point had defined his work, opening himself up to the formal trends of his century. Mario Lavagetto, “Introduzione,” in Saba, Tutte le poesie, LI-LVII.

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3. This quote is commonly attributed to Shaw, though its exact origin is uncertain. Other versions of the same sentiment are reproduced by other authors, for instance, Marta Feldman: “A tenor and a soprano want to make love, but are prevented in doing so by the baritone.” Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 386. 4. Peter Conrad, A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera (New York: Poseidon Press, 1987), 42. 5. Conrad, A Song of Love and Death, 42. 6. “Liebestod” is the title of the last musical motif in Tristan Und Isolde, the score of the climactic moment in which Isolde cries over Tristan’s dead body. The term, a German composite for “love” (“Liebe”) and “death” (“Tod”) is also used in literary studies to indicate the so-called theme of “love-death” or the consummation of two lovers’ destiny in their death. From Orpheus and Eurydice, to Romeo and Juliet, and to Tristan and Isolde, it is a myth central to Western culture. 7. Saba claims that Nuovi versi alla Lina “sono come una poesia sola, un lungo canto di abbandono, frammisto a rimproveri, a rimpianti, ad accuse, che il poeta rivolge ora alla donna, ora a sé stesso” (The “New Lines to Lina” are like a single poem, a long refrain to loneliness mingled with reproaches, regrets, and accusations that the poet addresses alternately to his wife and to himself). Saba, Tutte le prose, 161. Trans. Sartarelli, 49. 8. Fausto Curi reads “Nuovi versi alla Lina” as Saba’s most overt attempt to compose an operatic artwork—a suite of poems that possessed its own inner music. Fausto Curi, “L’onestà del melodramma,” Poetiche 3 (2003): 371. 9. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 136: “I say: ‘I’m rotten…’ and you: ‘If you really love me / may our rottenness be blessed’ / ‘…but I never tire of kissing you.’ / ‘Who ever gets tired of happiness?’ // I tell you: ‘Lina, what with our past, / to love … now … requires / such forgetfulness!’ / You answer: ‘The heart can’t be compelled, / And what’s done is done.’ // I say: ‘Will I be able to forgive myself; / Will I ever see you as before?’ / You say: ‘You wish to hold me in high esteem? This you must do: love me.’” Trans. Hochfield, 139. 10. In my use of the adjective “melodramatic,” I refer both to its literal meaning, “pertaining to melodrama,” and to its broader theoretical connotation, described by Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Brooks describes the melodramatic as a narrative mode, the origins of which are to be traced back to nineteenthcentury French melodrama. This mode, a “total and coherent aesthetic,” is characterized by a predilection for the extreme and the excessive in the portrayal of human emotions and behavior.

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11. Saba, Tutte le prose, 162. 12. Saba, Tutte le prose, 855: “He is the most genital artist I know, even too lustful to be considered an artist. His major beatitude is to possess the beloved woman, the worst accident to lose a dear one. These are the key-­ features of his eternal melodies of love and death.” 13. Sigmund Freud first elaborated his ideas on human sexuality in a 1915 emendation to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 1905). In this work, Freud proposed several stages of development of one’s sexuality: the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage, the latency stage and, finally, the genital stage. Beginning in adolescence, the genital stage lasts until one’s death and corresponds with a development of both ego and superego. It is during this phase that human beings begin developing sexual attraction for people outside the family. 14. Saba, Tutte le prose, 855: “His eternal melodies of love and death.” 15. “Eros è una parola cara a Saba che considera i poeti ‘Sacerdoti di Eros’” (“Eros” is a word very dear to Saba, who considers poets to be “priests of Eros”). Saba, Tutte le prose, 231. Trans. Sartarelli, 115. 16. Saba, Tutte le prose, 215. 17. Saba, Tutte le prose, 212. 18. “Anche le fanciulle si distinguono una dall’altra per un tratto di carattere, una particolarità che assorbe tutto il resto della figura” (Like the similar Prisoners, each girl is distinguished from the others by a character trait, a peculiarity, that absorbs everything else). Saba, Tutte le prose, 216. Trans. Sartarelli, 101. 19. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 291: “Standing naked, hands behind / your back, as if you have bound / them tightly. Breasts / erect, tempting bites.” Trans. Hochfield, “Girls,” 291. 20. Saba encountered Freud only in the late 1920s, when he underwent psychoanalytic treatment with Edoardo Weiss (1891–1970), pioneer of psychoanalysis in Italy. This encounter had powerful repercussions on Saba’s poetry. According to the poet himself, it is due to his psychoanalytic treatment and a more complete understanding of psychoanalysis that he was able to develop a clearer style in Parole and the following poems, one less reliant on fixed metrical forms and a limited vocabulary, but closer to the formal experimentations of his contemporaries. 21. I discuss this scorciatoia (“Nietzsche”) in greater depth in Chap. 3. 22. “Nietzsche non fu un filosofo: fu il caso estremo di una quasi completa sublimazione di Eros” (Nietzsche wasn’t a philosopher. He was the epitome of an almost complete sublimation of Eros. He was other things too, I know). Saba, Tutte le prose, 31. Trans. Sartarelli, 179.

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23. Romano Luperini, “La cultura di Saba,” L’ombra d’Argo 2, no. 5–6 (1985): 68. For a study of Saba’s debt to Weininger, see Alberto Cavaglion, “Saba e Weininger,” in Umberto Saba: Trieste e la cultura mitteleuropea, ed. Rosita Tordi (Milan: Mondadori, 1986), 269–277. 24. For a study of Weininger’s impact on Italian culture, see Alberto Cavaglion, Otto Weininger in Italia (Rome: Carucci, 1982). 25. Cavaglion, “Saba e Weininger,” 275. I discuss Saba’s homosexuality more extensively in Chap. 3, note 3. 26. “Risulta probabile che a dilatare la dimensione melodrammatica del poemetto e ad accentuare certi toni abbia contribuito la lettura di Sesso e carattere di Weininger” (It is probable that the reading of Weininger’s Sex and Character contributed to dilating the melodramatic dimension of the poem and to accentuating some of its extreme tones). Curi, “L’onestà del melodramma,” 371. 27. Saba, Tutte le prose, 160. 28. “The pathos of love / in our hearts, / like a secret care or lonely / fervor, always more inward and precious; / for you a sweet thought / marries a bitter memory, / dispels the ennui that stagnates inside / and then it stays with you all your life.” Trans. Hochfield, “The Pathos of Love,” 117. 29. Milanini in Saba, Coi miei occhi, 91. 30. “Your father? Banish, my dear, / this bitter memory. / You have a husband and father in me.” 31. Lonardi, Il fiore dell’addio, 36. 32. “Mozart is the greatest among classical composers, and . . . his Don Giovanni deserves the highest place among all classic works of art.” Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 76. 33. For Kierkegaard, the natural means to this immediacy is music, and “the essence of Don Giovanni is music. He dissolves before us into music, he dilates into a world of tones.” Kierkegaard, 153. 34. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 322: “Oh cause / of my pain, and also, / yes, my joy.” Trans. Hochfield, 315. 35. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 322: “Thanks to you, I now see / people coming and going, / tall ships departing, / the vast world making itself / a single thing for you.” Trans. Hochfield, 315–317. 36. Saba, Tutte le prose, 226: “The ‘desire’ Saba is talking about is carnal desire; it accompanies man from his birth to his death, giving him no rest or respite.” Trans. Sartarelli, 110. 37. See Chap. 3. “La brama deriva sensibilmente dal “Pensiero dominante” di Leopardi; ed anche, un poco, dal risveglio di Tristano all’ultimo atto. Vogliamo dire che Saba aveva, quando scrisse questa poesia, accolte ed assimilate dentro di sé quella lirica e quella musica” (“Desire” is noticeably derived from Leopardi’s “Pensiero dominante”; and also, a little,

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from Tristan’s reawakening in the final act. Saba, when writing the piece, had accepted and absorbed within himself that poem and that music). Saba, Tutte le prose, 225–26. Trans. Sartarelli, 110. 38. Leopardi wrote this group of five poems, including “Il pensiero dominante,” “Amore e morte,” “Il consalvo,” “A se stesso,” and “Aspasia,” between 1831 and 1834 during his Florentine stay. The poems were inspired by and dedicated to Fanny Targioni Tozzetti (1801–1889), a noblewoman and the host of an important literary circle in which Leopardi participated. The poet eventually fell in love with Targioni Tozzetti. These poems represent an important step in the evolution of Leopardi’s philosophical system. They center on the theme of carnal love, a novelty for the poet. Most importantly, this cycle chronicles the poet’s approach to so-called “Cosmic pessimism.” While love is first welcomed as the most powerful of human motives, it is ultimately portrayed as the final illusion for men, and the failure of Leopardi’s erotic experience dictates a change of heart: with love, all other human illusions disappear and leave in their absence a complete desperation. This ultimate disillusionment leads Leopardi to contemplate the absolute vanity of human existence. 39. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 321: “Other than you, what have I talked about / in the practice of my art; what have I hidden / or unveiled other than you?” Trans. Hochfield, 313. 40. Leopardi, Canti, 209: “Who doesn’t speak / of your mysterious nature? / Who hasn’t felt its power among us?” Trans. Galassi, 213. 41. Leopardi, Canti, 209: “Terrible but precious / gift of heaven.” Trans. Galassi, 213. 42. Leopardi, Canti, 212: “One love alone / lives among us: the eternal laws / gave it to the human heart, as its all-commanding lord.” Trans. Galassi, 219. 43. Leopardi, Canti, 210: “What are they in my eyes now / next to you, / all earthly works, the whole of life!” Trans. Galassi, 215. 44. “La brama” (23–27). Saba, Tutte le poesie, 320–21: “And from his bed / already stained, the proud youth / leaps up disgusted, in horror at himself, / whose heart is oppressed with shame / and self-reproach for the whole day.” Trans. Hochfield, 311–313. 45. Saba confirms that this image was based on Tristan in Storia e cronistoria. Saba, Tutte le prose, 225–26 (quoted above, note 44). 46. As critic Bryan Magee best puts it, in his discussion of the philosopher’s influence on Tristan und Isolde: “The entire work is a sort of musical equivalent of Schopenhauer’s doctrine that existence is an inherently unsatisfiable web of longings, willings and strivings from which the only permanent liberation is the cessation of being.” Magee, The Philosophy of

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Arthur Schopenhauer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 356. James McGlathery offers a detailed analysis of Wagner’s principal operas in light of their focus on the erotic theme in Wagner’s Operas and Desire (New York: Peter Lang, 1998). However, Schopenhauer’s influence extends far beyond eroticism. For instance, according to Magee, Wagner conceived of the second and third acts of Tristan und Isolde as a dramatization of the philosopher’s ideas. Behind the metaphorical opposition of the realms of Day and Night, Wagner masks the dialectic between the Phenomenon and Noumenon that Schopenhauer discusses in his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818). Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York: Henry and Holt Company, 2000), 126–173. Schopenhauer discusses the centrality of sex in the lives of human beings, and its relation to artistic creation, in the essay “The Metaphysics of Love” (1818): “The yearning of love, the [Greek: Ίμερος], which has been expressed in countless ways and forms by the poets of all ages, without their exhausting the subject or even doing it justice; this longing which makes us imagine that the possession of a certain woman will bring interminable happiness, and the loss of her, unspeakable pain; this longing and this pain do not arise from the needs of an ephemeral individual, but are, on the contrary, the sigh of the spirit of the species, discerning irreparable means of either gaining or losing its ends. It is the species alone that has an interminable existence: hence it is capable of endless desire, endless gratification, and endless pain. These, however, are imprisoned in the heart of a mortal . . . and can find no expression for the announcements of endless joy or endless pain.” Schopenhauer, Essays of Schopenhauer, Trans. Rudolph Dirkcs (London: Scott, 1897), 194–95. 47. In reference to Wagner, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek polemically challenges Freud’s placement of Eros and Thanatos as two opposed forces. In the actions of Wagner’s characters, he recognizes what Freud defines as the “death drive,” a desire for death and self-destruction. However, Žižek argues that death is love’s true object and offers the Wagnerian characters a liberation from their self-destructive tendencies as well as their perpetual longing: “Love itself culminates in death, its true object is death, and longing for the beloved is longing for death . . . The death drive does not reside in Wagner’s heroes’ longing to find peace in death; it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying . . . The final passing away of the Wagnerian hero (the death of the Dutchman, Wotan, Tristan, Amfortas) is therefore the moment of their liberation from the clutches of the death drive.” Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2002), 106. 48. “Il piccolo Berto” marks a pivotal moment in Saba’s conversion to psychoanalysis. Saba explains that this collection of poems is essentially a

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collection of memories from childhood. The young Berto, the poet’s alter ego, is described as a young boy “reborn” after being cured by psychoanalysis. The procedure is described as removing the amnesia that surrounds early childhood memories and finding within them the deepest reasons for the boy’s inner conflicts. Saba, Tutte le prose, 261. Mario Lavagetto underscores the centrality of this poemetto in the thematic development of Saba’s poetry, in that it marks a passage to a phase of his poetry characterized and defined by Saba’s encounter with psychoanalysis. For Lavagetto, “Il piccolo Berto” openly mirrors Saba’s own experience of analysis with Doctor Weiss. The critic reinforces his claim by citing Saba’s own words: “La psicanalisi, che aveva . . . portato alla luce il bambino e gli aveva dato la parola, strappandolo dall’ombra in cui continuava a mormorare e a condizionare le azioni dell’adulto” (Psychoanalysis, which had . . . brought the child to light and had given him the ability to speak, elevating him from the shadow in which he continued to whisper and condition the actions of the adult). Lavagetto, “Introduzione,” Tutte le poesie, LI. 49. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 335: “Is it fascination? Is it disgust? Is it both? / Who knows? Maybe he’s thinking of his mother, / or wondering if this is love.” Trans. Hochfield, “Eros,” 333. 50. Italics mine throughout. The word “altero” will be recognized by opera audiences as an echo of the famous “Un dì, felice” in La traviata I.3: “Di quell’amor che è l’anima / dell’universo intero, / misterioso e altero, / croce e delizia al cor” (Love which is the soul / of the entire universe, / mysterious and proud, / cross and delight of the heart). Saba uses the adjective “altero” (proud) at points throughout the Canzoniere. In “Sonetto di primavera” (“Spring Sonnet”): “Io solo qui di desideri vani / t’esalto, mia inesperta anima altera” (Alone with my vain desires / I celebrate you, my proud, inexperienced soul). In “Così passo i miei giorni” (“How I Spend my Days”): “Solo alle volte mi mescolo alle altere / genti del mondo. E anch’io quei loro affanni / provo: non cure tacite severe / ma le lotte crudeli e l’onte e i danni” (Only at times I mix myself with the proud / people of the world. And I share their pain: / not just secret worries / but cruel struggles and offenses and damages). In “L’uomo” (“The Man”): “Nel largo petto il suo cuore non era / altrui malvagio, la bocca di altera / forma era facile al riso” (Inside his large chest his heart was not / evil, the proud shape of his mouth / was prone to smiling). In “Vacanze” (“Holidays”): “E sull’altero volto / la mia condanna per sempre si incide” (And on the proud face / my sentence is forever worn). In “Dall’erta” (“From the Hill”): “Un fanciullo / che se Borea t’investe, mette l’ali / a ogni cosa, per te vola. Poi torna / a se stesso, ti passa accanto altero” (A young boy / that if Boreas invested you,

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he would put wings / on everything, make everything fly. / Then he would come back to himself, / pass proudly next to me). In “Campionessa di nuoto” (“Swimming Champion”): “E un giorno / un’ombra mesta ti scendeva—oh, un attimo!—/ dalle ciglia, materna ombra che gli angoli / ti incurvò della bella bocca altera” (And one day / a sad shadow came down—just for a moment!—/ from your eyelashes, like a maternal shadow / that bent the angles of your proud mouth). 51. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 335: “He only listens to the music, light / trivial stuff, dear to me also / at times, which for him has become, / in his homely but proud spirit, // a battle march.” Trans. Hochfield, 333. 52. “That love that’s the pulse of the universe, the whole universe, / Mysterious, mysterious and proud, / Torture, torture and delight / Torture and delight, delight to the heart.” 53. The noun “compassion” comes from the Latin noun “compassionem” and the verb “compatire,” a composite of the preposition “cum” (with) and the verb “patire” (to suffer). “Compatire” thus literally means “to suffer with,” “to share somebody else’s suffering.” 54. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 344: “A man in agony / you have comforted. / Do not forget Eleonora, / do not forget, my Eleonora!” 55. This scene of Il trovatore has inspired several authors, in particular, as Lonardi convincingly demonstrates, Montale. In Chap. 6, I will discuss this opera and Montale’s references to it more extensively. Luigi Pirandello also wrote a short story entitled “Leonora, addio!” (1910), later collected in Novelle per un anno (1922–1937). Pirandello adapted this short story into a play entitled “Questa sera si recita a soggetto” (1928–29), first performed in Königsberg, Germany on January 25, 1930 (in German translation). The first Italian performance was in Turin, on April 14, 1930. 56. Saba, Tutte le prose, 237. The reference to this character  forms part of Saba’s erotic symbolism. In this regard, Mengaldo argued that Leonora is one of the highest manifestations of Verdian eroticism. Mengaldo, “Montale critico musicale,” 221. 57. Mila, Verdi, 468. 58. I will analyze this particular operatic moment in greater depth in the following chapter, while discussing Verdi’s influence on Montale’s poetry. 59. For instance, Pietro Cataldi has analyzed Verdi’s influence on Saba’s poetry, focusing on a series of thematic and textual affinities between the two. Cataldi identifies a number of textual citations from Verdi’s opera that resonate with Saba, in particular when he deals with the erotic. For instance, in “La brama,” Cataldi identified numerous textual citations from Verdi’s Otello—an opera inspired by Shakespeare’s famous tale of love and jealousy—that focus on the erotic theme. Cataldi, “Saba e Verdi,” 54-55n.

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60. Saba envisioned his Canzoniere as divided into three books, which correspond to three different stages of his poetry as well as different periods of his life. This partition is preserved in the current edition of the book. However, before the publication of the 1945 Einaudi edition, the publisher considered releasing the Canzoniere as three separate volumes, as testified in a letter by Saba to his daughter Linuccia dated January 1945. See Umberto Saba, La spada d’amore: Lettere scelte 1902–1957, ed. Aldo Marcovecchio (Milano: Mondadori, 1983), 23. See also Marcovecchio’s note in La spada d’amore, 123. 61. Chiaretta is a central character of Saba’s poetry. Saba himself underscores her centrality in Storia e cronistoria when he claims that “Chiarezza” (Clarity) could have been the title of the Canzoniere. Saba, Tutte le prose, 628. 62. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 251: “I started out from Melancholy / and on the way found Bliss.” Trans. Hochfield, “Finale,” 251. 63. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 251: “Art hardly helps me not to think / of her; yet from many scattered things it makes / one beautiful thing in me. And a good verse / cures me of every ill.” Trans. Hochfield, 251. 64. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 225: “From you, my heart, I await the final song, / And thinking of it pleases me.” Trans. Hochfield, 225. Italics mine. 65. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 225: “And I heard him singing / To himself, but so that the city / Heard it too, and the hills and shore, / and above else my heart.” Trans. Hochfield, 225. 66. Saba, Tutte le prose, 200–01. 67. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 225–226: “But on that bright morning / the voice warned of something else, and you / know, my heart, what strange things / you asked yourself while listening: / will the boat sail far away; was suffering / not vain, and my being sad a fault?” Trans. Hochfield, “The Morning Song,” 227. 68. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 227: “Melancholy, / you fatally consume / my life, / and there is nothing in the world, nothing, / that diverts me.” Trans. Hochfield, “Melancholy,” 229. 69. This younger Saba, however, is significantly older than Chiaretta (though it is not specified by how much). 70. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 237: “With what ingenuous cunning, little girl, / you stretched out, now face down, now on your back. / . . . / how much you revealed to my enraptured eyes / rolling about the grassy meadows.” Trans. Hochfield, “Chiaretta on vacation,” 233. 71. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 238: “There is much to enjoy with looking, / lovely Chiaretta, but sweeter is it to have / the one you love to yourself alone.” Trans. Hochfield, 235.

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72. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 238: “I led you by the hand / Behind a low wall and kissed your / Ardent mouth for a long time.” Trans. Hochfield, 235. 73. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 238: “I heard an angry rebuke / from you, ‘Take such a chance here?’” Trans. Hochfield, 235. 74. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 238: “Anger and sadness showed in many eyes.” Trans. Hochfield, 237. 75. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 242: “I look at the real, and trace / The sweet life / With something more // That says: look and revere: / See how lovely the world is / If your pain is cast aside.” Trans. Hochfield, “The Engraver,” 241. 76. Saba comments: “Formalmente, le Canzonette sono tutte composte di strofette chiuse; la misura dei versi e il gioco delle rime si ripete in tutte le strofe dei componimenti, imitando il modello, volta a volta, offerto dalla prima. Né mai, come in quest’epoca della sua vita, Saba fu così ligio alle forme regolari” (In terms of form, the Canzonettas are all made up of short stanzas with regular rhyme schemes. The meter and rhyme are repeated in each stanza of the compositions, each time imitating the model of the first stanza. Never was Saba so observant of regular forms as in this period of his life). Saba, Storia e cronistoria, 191–192. Trans. Sartarelli, 77. 77. “Dei due elementi fondamentali che, all’esame empirico, ci sembrano caratterizzare una musica lineare, orizzontale e non armonica e verticale quale è una musica fatta di parole, di questi due elementi che sono ritmo e melodia, quello a cui Saba si attacca maggiormente, quello da cui ricava la maggiore persuasione che la sua è davvero musica, si direbbe che sia il ritmo” (The fundamental elements which, at an empirical examination, seem to characterize a linear, horizontal, non-harmonic, and vertical music—a music made of words—are rhythm and melody. But the most important “musical” element for Saba’s poetry is certainly rhythm, persuading him that his poetry really is music). Debenedetti, Poesia italiana del Novecento, 163. 78. His metrical choices, for instance, include the use of regular meters such as settenario, novenario, and endecasillabo; the use of rhymes, repetitions, and closed forms; and the use of canzone forms and sonnets, in contrast to the experimental tendencies of his contemporaries. 79. Solmi, Scrittori negli anni (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1963), 35. 80. Roland Barthes, making a distinction between classical and modern poetry, gives his definition of “relational poetry”: “The economy of classical language (Prose and Poetry) is relational, which means that in it words are abstracted as much as possible in the interest of relationships. In it, no word has a density by itself, it is hardly the sign of a thing, but rather the means of conveying a connection.” On the other hand, modern

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poetry “must be ­distinguished from classical poetry and from any type of prose, [it] destroys the spontaneously functional nature of language, and leaves standing only its lexical basis. It retains only the outward shape of relationships, their music, but not their reality.” Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 41–52. 81. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 306:  “Now that I can forget /—albeit for a short while—/ how close to my heart / is the pain of the world // and for this inner peace / I can finally enjoy / my heart is thankful / as much as it’s deep.” 82. These breakdowns occurred in the spring of 1924 and the winter of 1926: see Arrigo Stara’s chronology in Tutte le prose, LXII. Despite the physical and mental pain of these breakdowns, Saba felt that they sharpened his understanding of the world. His poetry goes through what he calls an “illimpidimento”—an intensification of vividness (again underscoring the connection he finds between suffering and creativity). Saba’s work in the bookstore that he would own all his life was, incidentally, also instrumental for overcoming these crises. 83. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 306: “I turn two evils / into a higher good. / Among so many sorrows / I do not say: I am done.” 84. “Le Sonate per violino solo di Sebastiano Bach, che egli non fu certamente mai in grado di eseguire, lo affascinavano in modo singolare, anche per motivi estranei, in parte, alla musica. Soprattutto lo aveva colpito un Fuga, che di quelle Sonate fa parte, e della quale si era provato a decifrare le prime note . . . Ora accadde che un giorno—udendo una sua nipotina eseguire al piano certi esercizi, Saba ebbe egli pure la sua ‘strana idea’ . . . di ‘suonare il violino sul piano’ . . . si proponeva, in una parola, di eseguire al piano i pezzi—gli studi—che, da ragazzo, non era riuscito a eseguire sul violino; tra questi la famosa Fuga di Bach . . . Per Saba quella di ‘suonare il violino sul piano’ si trasformò—altre circostanze aiutando— nel libro che adesso s’intitola Preludio e fughe” (The Sonatas for Solo Violin of Johann Sebastian Bach, which he certainly was never capable of playing, held a special fascination for him, in part for reasons extraneous to music. He was particularly taken with one Fugue that formed part of those Sonatas, and had even attempted to decipher its opening notes . . . Now, as it turned out, one day, upon hearing a niece of his playing some exercise on the piano with deplorable indifference, Saba had his own “strange idea” . . . of “playing the violin on the piano” . . . His intention, in short, was to perform at the piano the very pieces—the studies—that he had been unable to perform as a child on the violin, including the famous Bach fugue . . . For Saba, the “desire to play the violin at the piano” was transformed, with the help of other circumstances, into the book now entitled Prelude and Fugues). Saba, Tutte le prose, 249. Trans. Sartarelli, 130–31.

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85. “The fugue is usually considered the most intellectual of musical forms . . . For rather obvious reasons, the literary fugue has seldom been attempted. The form is essentially contrapuntal, and, as we have already seen, real counterpoint is impossible in literature.” Brown, Music and Literature, 149–151. 86. “Like various large musical forms, it is simply an expansion of ABA form, but each section has its own prescribed structure . . . the fugue is divided into three sections: the exposition, middle section (development), and final section. The exposition begins with the announcement of the subject, or theme, in a single voice, unaccompanied. When the subject has been thus given out, a different voice enters and repeats it . . . The middle section gives the composer a good deal more freedom than does the exposition. It is formed of episodes alternating with ‘middle entries’ of the subject . . . The final section returns to the keys of the exposition. Up to this point the entire treatment has been contrapuntal, but now the voices usually abandon their separate motion and finish off with a block of chords in the original key.” Brown, Music and Literature, 150–51. 87. “Naturally, a poor fugue is as tedious as a poor sonata or a poor march, but because of its very perfection of form a good fugue can be one of the most satisfactory forms of art, emotionally as well as intellectually.” Brown, Music and Literature, 149. 88. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 367: “Oh, come back to me voices of the past, / Dear, discordant voices! / Who knows but that in sweet new harmonies / I can make you sound again?” Trans. Hochfield, “Prelude,” 343. 89. As Saba explains in Storia e cronistoria: “Le Fughe sono voci che si parlano fra di loro, s’inseguono per dirsi cose ora contrastanti ed ora concordanti. Ma i loro contrasti . . . sono solo apparenti. Le voci sono, in realtà la voce di Saba; l’espressione—diventata poesia—del si e del no che egli disse alla vita, alla ‘calda vita,’ amata ed odiata al tempo stesso e dalla stessa persona. Riflettono uno stato d’animo, del quale Saba sofferse in modo più acuto forse di altri, ma comune agli uomini, che lo portano in sé senza sospettarlo, o almeno senza averne coscienza” (The Fugues are voices speaking amongst themselves, following one after the other to say things that are at times in conflict, at times in agreement. Yet . . . these conflicts are only apparent. The voices are, in fact, Saba’s voice: they are his expressions of the yes and the no—made into poetry—he says to life, “warm life,” that life at once loved and hated and feared by one person. They reflect a state of mind from which Saba suffered perhaps more acutely than others). Saba, Tutte le prose, 247. Trans. Sartarelli, 129. 90. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 367: “In peace / You may compose the richest harmonies, / Vainly discordant voices. / Light and shadow, joy and sadness / Love one another in you.” Trans. Hochfield, 343.

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91. A neurosis is a mild mental disorder: the term indicates a form of dissociation from reality, but is less acute than psychosis. While it has not been used for diagnoses in the past decades, it was a central idea in Freudian and Jungian theories. Freud saw neuroses as the psychosomatic manifestations of repressed aspects of a person’s psychosexual development. For Freud, their difference from psychosis lay in the level of dissociation from reality. The idea of a broken heart encompasses this dissociation, while symbolizing the sexual connotations implicit in Freud’s formulation. 92. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 401: “O my heart divided in two at birth, / how much pain I endured to make them one! / How many roses to hide an abyss!” Trans. Hochfield, 355. 93. In his essay on the linguistic aspects of Saba’s work, Lorenzo Polato treats Saba’s fugues as musical forms, focusing on the poet’s use of polyphony. Polato, “Aspetti e tendenze della lingua poetica,” Ricerche sulla lingua poetica contemporanea (Padua: Liviana Editrice in Padova, 1966), 39–90. Later reprinted in L’aureo anello: Saggi sull’opera poetica di Umberto Saba (Milan: Francoangeli, 1994), 47–86. Gianandrea Gavazzeni attacks this position, and reprises Sergio Solmi’s idea that Saba’s “fugues” are actually metaphorical. Gavazzeni denies the possibility of actually realizing musical forms in poetry. Gavazzeni, “Fra poesia e musica,” Nuova rivista musicale 2 (1968): 1089–91. 94. “E veramente questo ‘Fuga a tre voci’ è la poesia più ‘alta’ di Saba” (And this “Canto in Three Voices” truly is Saba’s “loftiest” poem). Saba, Tutte le prose, 253. Trans. Sartarelli, 134. 95. Saba, Tutte le prose, 253. 96. History and Chronicle of the Songbook, 134. 97. For its regularity and rhythmic predictability, this verse is considered to be among the most musical and memorable of the Italian metrical tradition, even if not the most prevalent in the Italian Novecento. This metrical form enjoyed better fortunes, however, in musical theater and opera librettos. As Friedrich Lippmann explains, the ottonario was often a privileged metrical form in eighteenth-century opera buffa and nineteenthcentury opera librettos. Lippmann, Versificazione italiana e ritmo musicale, 31. Coincidentally, the ottonario is also the most prevalent meter in Verdi’s early librettos. See Daniele Darra, A misura di canto: Aspetti di metrica nei libretti scritti per Verdi (PhD diss, University of Padua, 2014). As Gianfranca Lavezzi underscores, the ottonario is prominent in a number of arias and lyrical moments, for instance passages of La traviata, Saba’s favorite opera. Lavezzi, Manuale di metrica italiana (Roma: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1996), 224. 98. The poet goes so far as to evoke an episode that, unknowingly to him, inspired the composition of this poem in the first place. A young girl,

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likely Saba’s own daughter, was sitting in front of a mirror as two boys tried to seduce her. The first attempted to illustrate the joys of love, the other the torments. The young girl enjoys the attention and watches the scene and herself in the mirror. In Storia e cronistoria Saba expands on Debenedetti’s insight and explains that the first voice is that of extroversion, the second that of introversion. In these voices, one can also find a reformulation of the two characters in “La malinconia amorosa,” representing two different approaches to erotic love. 99. Debenedetti, “Saba,” 135. 100. Debenedetti, “Saba,” 141. 101. Saba, Tutte le poesie, 376:  “I do not know a sweeter thing / than the youthful love / of two lovers in happy rapture / dying in the arms of each other. // I do not know a higher pain / than being deprived of such pleasure, / and I wear no other chains / than two long white arms.” 102. “. . . due amanti in lieta ebbrezza / di cui l’un nell’altro muore” strongly echoes the overarching themes of La traviata (“Godiam, fugace e rapido, / è il gaudio dell’amore; / è un fior che nasce e muore / né più si può goder,” La traviata, I.2). 103. In Tristan und Isolde, erotic passion accompanies the two lovers as they meet their deaths; Mozart’s Don Giovanni is an impenitent sinner who eventually is punished with death; Bizet’s Carmen portrays eroticism as a wrecking force that haunts Don José and leads to Carmen’s death; lastly, in Verdi’s Rigoletto, the lust of the Duke of Mantua is the chifef cause of Gilda’s accidental killing.

References Primary Sources Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti: Poems. Trans. Jonathan Galassi. New  York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: 2010. ———. 1993. Canti, ed. Cesare Garboli. Turin: Einaudi. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1992. Either/Or. Trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin. Umberto Saba. 2001a. Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere. In Tutte le prose, ed. Arrigo Stara, 107–352. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1987. Atroce paese che amo. Bompiani: Milan. ———. 1981. Coi miei occhi, ed. Claudio Milanini. Milan: Il Saggiatore. ———. 1998. History and Chronicle of the Songbook. Trans. Stephen Sartarelli. Riverdale-on-Hudson: Sheep Meadow. ———. 1989. Il letterato Vincenzo: Dramma inedito, ed. Rosanna Saccani. Lecce: Piero Manni.

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———. 1983. La Spada d’Amore: Lettere Scelte 1902–1957, ed. Aldo Marcovecchio. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. ———. 1964. Prose, ed. Linuccia Saba. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. ———. 2008. Songbook. The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba. Trans. George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2004. Quante rose a nascondere un abisso: Carteggio con la moglie (1905–1956), ed. Raffaella Acetoso. Lecce: Manni. ———. 1988. Tutte le poesie, ed. Arrigo Stara. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2001b. Tutte le prose, ed. Arrigo Stara. Milan: Mondadori. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1897. Essays of Schopenhauer.  Trans. Rudolph Dirkcs. London: Scott.

Secondary Sources Barthes, Roland. 1953. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang. Brooks, Peter. 1976. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Brown, Calvin S. 1948. Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press. Carrai, Stefano. 2017. Saba. Rome: Salerno Editrice. Cataldi, Piero. 1985. Saba e Verdi. L’ombra d’Argo 5-6: 45–55. Cavaglion, Alberto. 1982. Otto Weininger in Italia. Rome: Carucci. ———. 1986. Saba e Weininger. In Umberto Saba Trieste e la cultura mitteleuropea, ed. Rosita Tordi, 269–277. Milan: Mondadori. Conrad, Peter. 1987. A Song of Love and Death. The Meaning of Opera. New York: Poseidon Press. Curi, Fausto. 2003. L’onestà del melodramma. Poetiche 3: 361–373. Darra, Daniele. A misura di canto. Aspetti di metrica nei libretti scritti per Verdi. PhD diss., University of Padua, 2014. Debenedetti, Giacomo. “Saba.” Poesia italiana del Novecento: Quaderni inediti. Milan: Garzanti, 1975: 125–173. Feldman, Martha. 2007. Opera and Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gavazzeni, Gianandrea. 1968. Fra poesia e musica. Nuova rivista musicale 2: 1089–1091. Lavezzi, Gianfranca. 2008. Dalla parte dei poeti: da Metastasio a Montale: Dieci saggi di metrica e stilistica tra Settecento e Novecento. Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina. ———. 1996. Manuale di metrica italiana. Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica. Lippmann, Friedrich. 1986. Versificazione italiana e ritmo musicale. I rapporti tra verso e musica nell’opera italiana dell’Ottocento. Naples: Liguori.

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Lonardi, Gilberto. 2003. Il fiore dell’addio: Leonora, Manrico e altri fantasmi del melodramma nella poesia di Montale. Bologna: Il Mulino. Luperini, Romano. 1985. La cultura di Saba. L’ombra d’Argo 2 (5–6): 56–79. Magee, Bryan. 1983. The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. The Tristan Chord. Wagner and Philosophy. New York: Henry and Holt Company. McGlathery, James Melville. 1998. Wagner’s Operas and Desire. New  York: Peter Lang. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. 1984. Montale critico musicale. Studi novecenteschi XI. 28: 197–238. Mila, Massimo. 2000. Verdi. Milan: Rizzoli. Polato, Lorenzo. “Aspetti e tendenze della lingua poetica.” L’aureo anello. Saggi sull’opera poetica di Umberto Saba. Milan: Francoangeli, 1994: 47–86. Solmi, Sergio. 1963. Scrittori negli anni: Saggi e note sulla letteratura italiana del ‘900. Milan: Il Saggiatore. Žižek, Slavoj, and Mladen Dolar. 2002. Opera’s Second Death. New  York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Strange Mercy: Montale, Opera, and the Death of Tragedy

6.1   The Storm and Other Prisons La bufera e altro—The Storm and Other Things—is Montale’s third book of poetry. First published in 1956, it is divided into seven sections and comprises poems written between 1943 and 1954. His previous book, Le occasioni (1939), was a songbook dedicated to the feminine figura Clizia, a pseudonym for the American Dantist Irma Brandeis.1 Inspired by the stilnovismo of Dante’s late Middle Ages, Montale saw Clizia as an idealized salvation (much like Dante’s own Beatrice). In La bufera e altro, however, Clizia is gradually replaced by other feminine figures like Volpe and Mosca, who embody different, more earthly conceptions of poetic love. This replacement is the first sign of the personal crisis that lies at the heart of the collection, which indeed was the last Montale published before ceasing to write poetry for several years. Alberto Bertoni described La bufera e altro as Montale’s most multifaceted book and as such the most prone to multiple interpretations.2La bufera e altro’s operatic thematics is far more cohesive and coherent than that of Ossi di seppia and Le occasioni. In La bufera e altro, Montale limits this thematics to a set group of specific operas and famous scenes, putting his operatic allusions into communication with each other. These allusions are crucial in particular for Montale’s theme of the conflict between individual and collective destiny—that is, between self and history. This conflict is at the root of a crucial imprisonment motif, which Montale had © The Author(s) 2020 M. Acetoso, Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46091-4_6

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initiated in previous works but develops in La bufera e altro, frequently portraying himself as trapped in enclosed spaces. La bufera e altro takes this motif a step further than in Le occasioni, where it was always a metaphorical imprisonment, appearing through analogy and imagery to represent the narrator’s distance from his lover. In La bufera e altro, however, Montale merges such metaphors with literal imprisonments, always pointing back to an interior/exterior divide (symbolizing the self vs. history) and conveying this idea through references to opera. Gilberto Lonardi, in his seminal work on Montale and opera, underscores the centrality of the imprisonment theme in La bufera e altro. Montale’s readers might understandably look for literary models for this theme—Roberto Orlando, for instance, connects it to Montale’s translation of Melville’s ballad “Billy in the Darbies” (“darbies” meaning handcuffs).3 But Lonardi convincingly shows that the prison of La bufera e altro was primarily opera-inspired, evoking in particular Verdi’s Il trovatore and Puccini’s Tosca.4 As Lonardi explains, Montale’s “imprisonment” portrays the modern sense of entrapment in history: “Il metafisico prigioniero montaliano sente il fiato fisico della storia . . . con un’istanza dei fatti e delle cose che non c’era a questo grado prima della Bufera.”5 In this chapter, I probe and build on this idea, but I will add a crucial detail. There is a further level of “confinement” in La bufera e altro, and the actual prison is the poetic form itself. I will argue that, in tandem with Montale’s feeling of political impotence amid the horrors of the twentieth century, he also felt an artistic impotence—a sense that the poetic form had lost its relevance in contemporary society, a loss that led him to despair and to a long hiatus from poetry, during which he wrote short stories, newspaper articles, and translations of several English and French authors.6 What would eventually liberate Montale from this artistic “imprisonment” would be a compelling sense of detachment from reality and the contamination of poetry with other literary genres, including opera. In La bufera e altro, Montale relies on a vivid operatic imagery and comes to terms with his artistic imprisonment, thus foreseeing in opera a possible liberation from the constraints of lyrical poetry.

6.2   The Storm of History The desolation of La bufera e altro prompted Glauco Cambon to describe it as the encounter of Dante and Bruegel.7 Flemish Renaissance painter Peter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569) was famous for his winter scenes,

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landscapes, and depictions of the people of sixteenth-century Flanders. But Cambon is comparing La bufera e altro to Bruegel’s darker visions— we can easily see the apocalyptic Triumph of Death (1562) in La bufera e altro’s “Da una torre” (“From a Tower”).8 In this poem, Montale depicts a childhood moment in his Monterosso summerhouse—a place dense with operatic memories, as we learned from Gadda’s eyewitness testimony (see Chap.4). Each of the poem’s three stanzas is introduced by the anaphora “Ho visto…” (“I have seen…”). The poet passively stares at a devastated country through the window of the house, images from his past surfacing and haunting his mind. The emphasis on spectatorship underscores the poet’s impotence in the face of the sweeping tragedy of war9: Ho visto nei vetri a colori filtrare un paese di scheletri da fori di bifore—e un labbro di sangue farsi più muto. (“Da una torre,”9–12).10

The tower itself (which, I will show, comes from operatic precedents) is the first level of confinement, limiting the speaker’s agency to seeing rather than acting. Montale can only look at this country of skeletons, the Brueghelian vision that is twentieth-century history laid out beneath him as if mocking his impotence, and finally his one ability—to express pain, to write—also comes to an end, represented first by the bloodied mouth and then by the announcement of muteness. Beyond Bruegel, Cambon points to the Dantean presence in La bufera e altro,11 seen best in “La primavera hitleriana” (“Hitler Spring”), a poem written in 1939 and first published in Inventario in 1946. In a note, Montale indicated the occasion that prompted the composition of the poem: Adolf Hitler’s visit to Florence on May 9, 1938, the conclusion of a week-long trip to Italy in preparation for the so-called Iron Pact, the alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.12 Hitler arrived at Florence’s Santa Maria Novella train station early in the morning. He was welcomed by a large delegation that guided him through an elaborate choreography, one that had required months of preparation and vast local participation. Fascist officers and dignitaries welcomed the dictator and large crowds gathered to watch, the city orchestra playing Deutschland über alles and other fascist anthems, including the ode “Giovinezza” (“Youth”).13Parading

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formations of warplanes decorated the skies over the city, while Hitler and his delegation viewed a program of monuments and visited an assortment of Florentine landmarks: Palazzo Pitti, Piazzale Michelangelo, the Boboli Gardens, and Santa Maria Novella church (the only church authorized by the Vatican to stay open that day).14 The evening was crowned with a gala in the Palazzo Medici, at the end of which Hitler returned to Berlin and Mussolini to Rome. In Montale’s depiction of the scene, the influence of Dante is unmistakable.15 In the opening image of the crowd rushing to cheer Hitler’s motorcade, the throngs are seen as a slaughter of moths, swarming and then covering the ground while the visiting delegation crunches them underfoot: Folta la nuvola bianca delle falene impazzite turbina intorno agli scialbi fanali e sulle spallette, stende a terra una coltre su cui scricchia come su zucchero il piede; l’estate imminente sprigiona ora il gelo notturno che capiva nelle cave segrete della stagione morta, negli orti che da Maiano scavalcano a questi renai. (“La primavera hitleriana,”1–7).16

While this rush and death stands for the doomed enthusiasm of many Italians at the pact with the Nazis, Hitler is cast as an infernal messenger17: Da poco sul corso è passato a volo un messo infernale tra un alalà di scherani, un golfo mistico acceso e pavesato di croci a uncino l’ha preso e inghiottito. (“La primavera hitleriana,” 8–10).18

But as Dantean as the poem’s imagery is, there is also a dense operatic intertextuality. The hellish delegation, bedecked with Nazi regalia as they welcome the German dictator, is portrayed as a Wagnerian orchestra: the “golfo mistico” (“mystic gulf”) here refers to the immense orchestra pit of the Bayreuth Festivalhaus, one of the many technical innovations introduced by Wagner.19 In Montale’s poetic imagery, this “mystic gulf” comes to metonymically signify Wagner himself,20 and by extension Nazi Germany’s adoration of the German composer, which Saba had previously attacked—Montale, like other contemporary intellectuals, sees Wagner

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through the lens of the German nationalism that set Europe on a crash course for World War II.21 In “La primavera hitleriana,” the infernal delegation of Florence likewise comes to symbolize the larger march of history that so disrupted the daily life of that city, defiling a place that Montale and others saw as the modern center of Enlightenment civilization.22 Montale feels a sense of deep defeat surrounding this parade and wonders whether all the hope that preceded that fated day had been extinguished by the arrival of this “horde”: Tutto per nulla dunque?—e le candele romane a San Giovanni, che sbiancavano lente l’orizzonte, ed i pegni e i lunghi addii forti come un battesimo nella lugubre attesa dell’orda. (“La primavera hitleriana,” 20–24).23

Even in the portrayal of such a dire historical moment, operatic echoes populate Montale’s vocabulary. In the passage above, the “lunghi addii” (“long farewells”) echo a passage from the end of Verdi’s Il trovatore, occurring, not coincidentally, in a tower. This is a favorite operatic moment of Montale’s, and he makes it into a refrain punctuating the entirety of Opera in versi24: LEONORA Sull’orrida torre, ah! par che la morte con ali di tenebre librando si va!... Ah! forse dischiuse gli fian queste porte sol quando cadaver già freddo sarà! MANRICO Sconto col. sangue mio l’amor che posi in te!... Non ti scordar di me!... Leonora, addio! LEONORA Di te, di te scordarmi! (Il trovatore, IV.1).25

This “farewell” refrain adds an important layer to the imprisonment theme that Lonardi highlighted—separation as another form of imprisonment. This concept can be seen even before La bufera e altro, namely in Le occasioni, Montale’s most musical work, in the “mottetto” “Addii, fischi nel buio, cenni, tosse” (“Goodbyes, whistles in the dark, waves, coughs”).26

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The final line above—“Di te, di te scordarmi!”—is referenced in Le occasioni’s “Il fiore che ripete dall’orlo del burrato” (“The flower on the Cliff’s Edge”), which conjures the funicular of Genoa as a cage, passing hillside flowers that seem to narrate with their very name—“Forget-­ me-­ not” (“nontiscordardimé”)—the farewell of two lovers as the funicular cabin pulls away: Il fiore che ripete dall’orlo del burrato non scordarti di me, non ha tinte più liete né più chiare dello spazio gettato tra me e te. (“Il fiore che ripete dall’orlo del burrato,” 1–5).27

Il trovatore was, in sum, fertile ground for Montale’s poetry. First performed in 1853, this opera is an adaptation of the Spanish play El trovador, written in 1836 by Antonio Garcia Gutierrez (1813–1884). The plot involves two men who are unknowingly brothers, Manrico and the Count of Luna, competing for the love of Leonora. Meanwhile, Manrico’s adoptive mother—the gypsy Azucena—conspires with Manrico to avenge her real mother, killed by the Count’s father years before. In the scene quoted above, from the final act, Manrico is sentenced to death by his rival and imprisoned in a tower—while he awaits his execution, he sings a farewell to Leonora in the distance, afflicted by terminal separation and (as Montale seized upon) feeling the weight of his impotence in the world. This operatic tension between individual and history is illustrated also by “Ballata scritta in una clinica” (“Ballad Written in a Clinic”), where the confinement is not the vertical isolation of a tower, but a claustrophobic sense of being trapped within the machinery of the war.28 It is August of 1944 in Nazi-occupied Florence—Montale is in the hospital attending to his wife, who is recovering from surgery. Raging around them is one of the daily clashes between the Nazis and Italian resistance fighters: —ma buio, per noi, e terrore e crolli di altane e di ponti su noi come Giona sepolti nel ventre della balena—. (“Ballata scritta in una clinica,” 5–8).29

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The speaker is gripped by terror. He compares his situation to that of Jonah in the whale, a biblical allegory of being “trapped” by divine will. These layers of imprisonment are ultimately put into an operatic frame, Montale’s speaker imagining himself as an actual prisoner on the eve of his execution, this time borrowing a line from Puccini’s Tosca: Attendo un cenno, se è prossima l’ora del ratto finale: son pronto e la penitenza s’inizia fin d’ora nel cupo singulto di valli e dirupi dell’altra Emergenza. (“Ballata scritta in una clinica,” 27–32).30

Standing before the spectacle of death and destruction in Florence, the poet declares himself ready for the final sentence: the destruction of the human race. It is the line that signals this—“son pronto”—that is most recognizably from Tosca. The opera premiered at the Theater Costanzi in Rome on January 14, 1900, with a libretto by Illica and Giacosa. The action is set in Rome in June 1800, during another occupation—that of the French following the collapse of the “Roman Republic.” Tosca stages a tale of love, jealousy, and death: the protagonist is the painter Cavaradossi, who is in love with the singer Tosca. The man is secretly aiding the underground resistance in the struggle against the French occupiers and is later arrested by Scarpia, the wicked police chief. In the opera’s final act, Cavaradossi is imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo—a tower in the Papal State fortress—waiting to be executed for hiding the republican conspirator Angelotti after his jailbreak. Tosca has bought the painter’s and her own safety from the evil Scarpia, whom she later stabs to death. A fake execution had been planned, but it is a trap: Cavaradossi is indeed killed, and Tosca is gripped by desperation and hopelessness, committing suicide by throwing herself off the roof of the castle in a quintessentially tragic opera ending: CARCERIERE L’ora! CAVARADOSSI Son pronto TOSCA Tieni a mente… al primo colpo... giù... CAVARADOSSI Giù. TOSCA Non rialzarti innanzi ch’io ti chiami.

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CAVARADOSSI TOSCA CAVARADOSSI (Tosca, III.4).31

No, amore! E cadi bene. Come la Tosca in teatro.

Montale thus identifies with Cavaradossi himself, framing his own personal drama in the Florence clinic, like that of Tosca and Cavaradossi, within a larger political conflict: another individual trapped within history. Montale, in other words, sees himself as a kind of literal prisoner in Florence, since he and others like him cannot even walk the occupied city’s streets. Nor does he hope for salvation, but instead uses the vocabulary of opera to express his stoic readiness (“Son pronto!”) for whatever may come.

6.3   The Prison of Poetry This passage in “Ballata scritta in una clinica” shows the central role of Puccini in La bufera e altro, but as I have indicated, Verdi remained the collection’s main operatic source. It is by looking again at Verdi’s presence that the point I introduced in this chapter’s opening—how poetry itself also becomes a prison for Montale—emerges. Verdi’s significance for Montale was not only a matter of personal and artistic admiration, but was also tied to the composer’s cultural importance. Montale cited Verdi’s works as the sole operas that succeeded in theater’s underlying quest to bring together the earthly and the heavenly, the mundane and the sublime.32 In La bufera e altro, Montale strongly evokes the idea of Verdi as a “civic poet”: a spokesman and champion of the Italian unification movement of the 1800s.33 His more explicit statements about Verdi’s towering importance come in Montale’s music criticism, for example, “Intervista immaginaria”: Credo di essere rimasto uno dei rari uomini d’oggi che comprenda il nostro melodramma. A quello verdiano dobbiamo la sorprendente ricomparsa, in pieno Ottocento, di alcune vampe del fuoco di Dante e di Shakespeare. Non importa se confuso più spesso col fuoco vittorhughiano.34

In La bufera e altro, Montale underscores the centrality of Verdi by ending the collection on a strong Verdian allusion. The poem “Anniversario” (“Anniversary”) concludes the last section and is followed

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only by the epilogue “Conclusioni provvisorie” (“Provisional Conclusions”), which I will discuss below. In “Anniversario,” the salvation that the narrator of “La primavera hitleriana” had envisioned through the arrival of Clizia—representing the end of the war and the possibility of redemption for the human race—has not materialized. But Montale introduces another feminine figure: the earthly Volpe, senhal for the Italian poet Maria Luisa Spaziani (1922–2014). In contrast to Clizia’s sweeping significance for humanity, Volpe is the bearer of private salvation, the only redemption that remains possible for the poet: È da quel giorno che sento vinto il male, espiate le mie colpe. Arse a lungo una vampa; sul tuo tetto, sul mio, vidi l’orrore traboccare. (“Anniversario,” 3–6).35

The word “vampa” (“blaze”) recurs frequently in Montale’s L’opera in versi, a motif of the horrors of encroaching war. The origin of the motif is a famous moment in Il trovatore: Stride la vampa! La folla indomita Corre a quel fuoco, lieta in sembianza! ... Stride la vampa! Giunge la vittima Nerovestita, discinta e scalza! (Il trovatore, II.1).36

In this cabaletta, Azucena tells Manrico (Il trovatore’s tragic hero) the fate her mother suffered, burned at the stake for witchcraft by the Count’s father. In Montale’s poetic economy, Azucena’s blaze—vampa—becomes yet another manifestation of the “storm” of History—la bufera—and its horrors. But the operatic resonance of the word—evoking Azucena as the poet waits for his own “execution”—fixes the speaker of “Anniversario” in a prison of awareness of his own mortality, whereas the storm of History will surely continue to churn after him.37 How, then, does this poem’s echo of Verdian imprisonment point to the idea of poetry itself as a prison? This antecedent has to do with the issue of the tragic that has figured so heavily in my inquiry: at the heart of Montale’s feeling of political impotence is a growing anxiety that poetry

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might be equally impotent, culturally irrelevant, and this anxiety came in the form of a question (circulating in Europe at that time, as we have seen) about whether ancient tragedy could be revived in modern times. Renato Poggioli contended that there were only two periods in history when the tragic was possible: “tragedy has come to full flower in only two moments of Europe’s intellectual life: in Greece during the century which began at Marathon and in Elizabethan England.”38 He goes on to challenge Nietzsche’s prophesy in Ecce homo of the advent of a new tragic age— Poggioli argues that tragedy is not possible in modern times due to what he defines as the “death of the sense of tragedy.” Tragedy, for Poggioli, is founded on the comprehension of evil and its repugnance, but this comprehension, he contends, has become elusive and ultimately unattainable in “any culture of historical and scientific disposition.”39 Poggioli’s argument in many ways anticipates George Steiner’s seminal Death of Tragedy (1961).40 Steiner is in line with Poggioli’s identification of the two periods when tragedy flourished in Western civilization, though he adds that tragic elements were present in the works of French dramatist Jean Racine (1639–1699). Beyond this, however, Steiner refrains from proposing a definition of tragedy—as he would later explain, “the semantic field of the noun ‘tragedy’ and of the adjective ‘tragic’ remains as indeterminate as its origins.”41 He focuses instead on that other recurring question—the causes of tragedy’s decline and demise. In his view (agreeing with Nietzsche), a crucial factor is the intrusion of rationality: Socrates in ancient Greece and the Enlightenment in the modern era. According to Steiner, tragedy was possible only in periods when men and women believed that events and even their own actions were directed by supernatural forces beyond their comprehension. Steiner casts rationality as an existential threat to the tragic form, both in the classical and the Shakespearean ages.42 Steiner derides the pairing of music and text in opera, calling this a triumph of artificiality.43 In his view only Mozart showed music’s potential to give life to tragic myth (even in the midst of the Enlightenment), but he left no successors, and the “operatic genre seemed incapable of seizing upon the possibilities opened by the decline of tragedy.”44 Steiner acknowledges how Wagner and Verdi came close to resuscitating tragedy: he cites Tristan und Isolde as the nearest one can get to a complete tragedy in modern times.45 Nonetheless, he praises Nietzsche for identifying the limitations of Wagner’s tragic ambitions, calling Bayreuth “not the cold sea air of the Greek tragic spirit but a hothouse of romantic religiosity.”46 Steiner emphasizes, that is, Nietzsche’s

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palinode on Wagner, and concludes that Wagner was tainted by nationalism and that both his and Verdi’s work was marred by a pervasive artificiality.47 Montale, however, disagrees with both Steiner and Poggioli before him. Even given his personal connections to Poggioli,48 for him the name of Shakespeare greatly bolstered opera’s potential claims on the tragic, due primarily to Verdi’s strong links to The Bard.49 Verdi admired Shakespeare from a young age: his copious letters reveal his ambition to make operatic adaptations of several works of Shakespeare, in particular his tragedies. He attempted operas based on Hamlet and The Tempest, and was especially obsessed with King Lear, a project he worked on for several years, proposing a draft to Salvadore Cammarano in 1850 (including a detailed outline and stage notes for four acts).50 The project was impeded, however, by various problems, most prominently Verdi’s difficulty in finding the right singers. Despite this failed dream, he succeeded in adapting a number of Shakespearean plays: Macbeth (his favorite tragedy), Otello, the aforementioned Falstaff (based on The Merry Wives of Windsor), and both Henry IV plays.51 Montale responded strongly to Verdi’s Shakespeare—beyond his general affinity for Verdi, he himself had been independently influenced by The Bard.52 Montale translated many of Shakespeare’s works, including Hamlet and a number of sonnets,53 and repeatedly paid tribute to the playwright’s genius, favoring especially his tragedies, as Verdi did.54 Montale thus implicitly casts Verdi as a tragedian whenever he compares him to Shakespeare. Shakespeare allowed Montale to see how allusions to Verdi’s operas could function as responses to poetry’s “confinement,” its inability to capture the tragic.55 Verdi’s wide popularity likewise allowed Montale to speak (through these allusions) to a broader collective consciousness, to convey a sense of the shared tragedy of the modern world, such as the events of thetwentieth century. In thinking this—that opera could revive the tragic—Montale was not alone. The Anglo-American poet W.  H. Auden (1907–1973), a figure whose influence on Montale was equal to Poggioli’s, reflected on the same issue but reached a conclusion different from Poggioli’s.56 Auden wrote extensively on the nature of opera and made it a central theme of both his theoretical and his creative output—among other works, he famously wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress (1951).57 In Auden’s view, opera is in fact especially suited to the tragic:

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The paradox implicit in all drama, namely, that emotions and situations which in real life would be sad or painful, are on the stage a source of pleasure becomes, in opera, quite explicit . . . Its pure artifice renders opera the ideal dramatic medium for a tragic myth.58

Whereas the Apollonian artificiality of words-in-music compelled Nietzsche (and Steiner) to dismiss the whole genre, for Auden it is this very inauthenticity—the affectedness of the drama—that makes opera superior to forms like cinema (for instance) by allowing it to overcome the limitations of a stringently mimetic representation of reality. For Auden, what makes opera the perfect genre for the tragic is the very openness of its fictionality.59 In a similar vein, Peter Brooks’ The Melodramatic Imagination challenged Nietzsche’s claim that “drama accompanied by music” (Brooks’ definition of melodrama)60—cannot sustain the tragic. Brooks frames the melodramatic as a general mode of narration, a form of theatricality he connects not only to opera, but also to the novels of Henry James and Honoré de Balzac. Brooks describes the melodramatic as a mode of excess, the origins of which can be traced back to nineteenth-century French theater. Much like Montale, Brooks sees melodrama as opening a space in which a modern form of the tragic is possible. As he puts it, melodrama provides a “coherent theatrical mode whose structure and characteristics . . . can teach [one] to read the whole body of modern literature with a fine perception of its project.”61In Brooks’ analysis, the “origins of melodrama can be accurately located within the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath,” with the subsequent “final liquidation of the Sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch).”62 Melodrama thus offered an alternative to the process of desacralization that followed the French Revolution, which had made tragedy no longer possible, by replacing the collective mythmaking of religion with a personal, individualized one. Melodrama became a ritual through which modern spectators could confront clearly defined forces and antagonists that were eventually defeated and expelled.63

6.4   After the Storm Perhaps the best proof that La bufera e altro’s opera thematics foretell Montale’s eventual “liberation” (from his doubts about tragic poetry, from the imprisonment of his frustration with the poetic form in the

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twentieth century) comes in his first work after his decade-and-a-half hiatus: Satura (1971). In the book’s first section, the poet makes yet another reference to Verdi’s Il trovatore—probably the most explicit citation of an operatic source that occurs in L’opera in versi: Pietà di sé, infinita pena e angoscia di chi adora il quaggiù e spera e dispera di un altro… (Chi osa dire un altro mondo?). …………………… ‘Strana pietà…’ (Azucena, atto secondo). (“Pietà di sé, infinita pena e angoscia,” 1–5).64

In Satura, Montale turns his attention to the humble details of daily life, a theme that had been present in previous works, but always in a high register, full of lyrical tension, whereas in Satura he favors parody, irony, and a mixing of styles. His language becomes more prosaic and at the same time more intimate, resembling the private tone of a diary. In this new mode, Montale revisits some of his early themes: in “Pietà di sé,” he again describes a state of paralysis stemming from the conflict between his own agnosticism and the human hope for an afterlife, a question that recurs throughout his works. He experiences this conflict in the form of an intense self-pity, a sensation that he nonetheless, in his agnosticism, is determined to resist. Unable to come to terms with this inner struggle between rationality and mortality, he conveys his plight with another reference from Il trovatore, even citing the source of the words “Strana pietà…” (“Strange mercy”) as the gypsy Azucena. With this allusion, Montale admits to an innate clinging to the idea of a non-physical dimension, a religious aspiration (in conflict with his areligious intellectual convictions) that will translate into a quintessentially modern paralysis that will turn out to be a key to finding his own mode of contemporary tragedy.65 The line comes from a pivotal moment in Il trovatore’s second act, in which Azucena asks Manrico (her adopted son) why he could not muster the resolve to finish the Count of Luna at the end of their fierce duel (in the preceding scene). Azucena lingers on the “strange” feeling of mercy that prevented Manrico from killing his rival: AZUCENA     Qual t’accecava strana pietà per esso? MANRICO     Oh madre! ...non saprei dirlo a me stesso!

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AZUCENA    Strana pietà… strana pietà… (Il trovatore, II,1)

The “strangeness” of Manrico’s mercy hints at a secret awareness of the hidden truth about himself and the Count of Luna: that they are actually brothers, separated in youth when Azucena took Manrico. This muted awareness paralyzes Manrico. The mythical undertones of familial strife and mistaken identity (evoking Oedipus Rex, Electra, Medea) mix with the tragic tenor of Verdi’s voice in the public consciousness. In channeling this (in “Pietà di sé”), Montale singles out the feelings of “angoscia” (“angst”) and “pietà” (“pity”),66 giving us his modern version of the “fear and pity” that Aristotle says are necessary for the catharsis of the tragic.67 The modern paralysis that Montale evokes in this passage harkens back to Pirandello, another author renowned for exploring the distinction between the modern and the ancient. In Pirandello’s Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal, 1904), the protagonist at one point attends a travelling Sicilian marionette show (Teatro dei Pupi) in Rome. Pascal has fled his previous life (after a corpse was mistakenly taken to be his body) and has taken up a false identity as Adriano Meis. At the marionette show, Pascal/Meis watches a staging of Sophocles’ tragedy Electra. In the culminating moment of the play, as Orestes is about to avenge the death of his father, Mattia Pascal begins to wonder what would happen if the primal emotions controlling the characters of the play—envy, hatred, and thirst for vengeance—were replaced by modern self-doubt and empathy. Very likely, Pascal/Meis concludes, this change would paralyze the protagonist, rendering him unable to act. The Greek tragic hero would thus transform into Shakespeare’s Hamlet,68 the epitome of the modern (anti-)hero.69 It is thus to evoke this idea of a modern, angst-ridden tragic hero that Montale echoes the “strana pietà” that paralyzed Verdi’s Manrico. After Montale’s years away from writing poetry, his return with Satura hinges on such operatic subtexts, and identifying this influence sheds much light on the opera thematics in La bufera e altro, their foreshadowing of both Montale’s hiatus (his paralysis) and his eventual means of returning to poetry. This is particularly true with regard to Montale’s casting of Il trovatore as a Shakespearean tragedy, but frequent references to Manrico and Cavaradossi show that Tosca also figures heavily in his work. Through the lens of the modernized “Strana pietà” of Satura, we can look back on the final poems of La bufera e altro—“Conclusioni provvisorie” (“Temporary Conclusions”)—and see them as a summation of the book’s premonitory

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tension between imprisonment and (operatic) freedom. This last section offers two final images of a poet who has succumbed to the tragedies of history and become paralyzed by the lack of a proper means of expression. Once again, Montale communicates this through an operatic vocabulary. In the first poem, entitled “Piccolo testamento” (“Little Testament”), Montale looks to the final storm that will destroy the human race, once more quoting a line from Tosca. In the second poem, “Il sogno del prigioniero,” Montale reprises the image of the prisoner, one that we can now better appreciate after having looked ahead to Satura’s “Strana pietà.”

6.5   Temporary Conclusions “Piccolo testamento” was Montale’s (temporary) farewell to poetry, in which he marked the end of the moral and intellectual conditions (in the world around him) necessary for his work as a poet to continue.70 There are infernal undertones to this declaration, as there were in “Primavera hitleriana”: a dark angel, another incarnation of the hellish messenger that announces the coming “storm” of history: Quando spenta ogni lampada la sardana si farà infernale e un ombroso Lucifero scenderà su una prora del Tamigi, del Hudson, della Senna scuotendo l’ali di bitume: semimozze dalla fatica, a dirti: è l’ora. (“Piccolo testamento,” 14–19).71

Again, here the Dantean influence is prominent: in the figure of Montale’s descending Lucifer it is easy to see a dark foil of the messenger of Inferno IX, or the demons of Cantos 21–22, or Dante’s own Lucifer (Canto 34). But the final line, “è l’ora” (“it is time”), brings us back to Puccini: to Cavaradossi in the final act of Tosca (“‘L’ora’… ‘Son pronto.’”). Once again Montale uses opera to project the private into the public, to make his own reckoning with his individual destiny into humanity’s collective reckoning with the intractable momentum of world events. This angel of death has come to bring the human race to the verge of extinction (“una storia non dura che nella cenere / e persistenza è solo l’estinzione,” 23–24).72 Much like in “Ballata scritta in una clinica,” the operatic allusion functions as a kind of familiar mnemonic for the central theme of the poem—a despairing surrender to the force of an oncoming future.

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Given the importance of Cavaradossi, the iconic prisoner, in La bufera e altro, it is no surprise that Montale concludes the book with “Il sogno del prigioniero” (“Prisoner’s Dream”). The poem’s nameless speaker is locked in a tower and further trapped by an inability to perceive the passage of time owing to the strange light in his prison, which generates a dreamy atmosphere reminiscent of Giovanni Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons—a fortress surrounded by towers and bridges, the gothic architecture looming and adding to the speaker’s confinement73: Albe e notti qui variano per pochi segni. Il zigzag degli storni sui battifredi, nei giorni di battaglia, mie sole ali, un filo d’aria polare, l’occhio del capoguardia dallo spioncino, crac di noci schiacciate, un oleoso sfrigolio dalle cave, girarrosti veri o supposti – ma la paglia è oro, la lanterna vinosa è focolare se dormendo mi credo ai tuoi piedi. (“Il sogno del prigioniero,” 1–9).74

Some scholars have read “Il sogno del prigioniero” as a political statement,75 namely an allegory on Fascism, merging the individual’s existential “imprisonment by history” with that of the actual prisoners of World War II: the Jews and other casualties of the concentration camps and the victims of Stalinist purges. Montale himself confirmed this overlapping of the political prisoner with the existential “prisoner”: “Il mio prigioniero può essere un prigioniero politico; ma può essere anche un prigioniero della condizione esistenziale.”76 Many literary sources contributed to this motif of polysemic imprisonment: from Calderon de la Barca’s La vida es sueño, to the episode of Count Ugolino in Inferno XXXIII, through to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.77 As I have emphasized in this chapter, however, all such precedents—as well as the looming precedent of ancient Greek tragedy—are filtered through the lens of Italian opera and the language Montale creates with his operatic allusions. The nameless prisoner that concludes La bufera e altro is a representation of the link between one person (the poet) and all people through the identification of our shared condition (our imprisonment in history).78 Montale’s means of expressing this link is to make his nameless prisoner into a composite of Manrico and

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Cavaradossi, two operatic characters both dear to him and well-known enough to have already had complex lives in the memories and subconscious of Montale’s readers.79 Having thus captured his readers, Montale adds further layers to “Il sogno del prigioniero.” In the prisoner’s eternal present, unable to tell whether he is dreaming or experiencing reality, he is awed by the profundity of the silence around him: a total lack of voices, only the distant cracking of nuts on the ground and the sizzle of frying food.80 This silence is the physical world’s analogue to the paralysis of inaction that is the mark of the modern tragic. The character of this multilayered theme—silence, confinement, paralysis—is changed when we know that Montale himself, while writing La bufera e altro, was nearing his own period of existential and artistic paralysis. As long as he had faith in the cultural relevance of poetry, he could sustain the painful awareness of his (and most individuals’) impotence in the world of politics and history. But when he began to harbor doubts about poetry’s relevance, he experienced a growing feeling not only of impotence but of confinement— imprisonment, paralysis, muteness. Reading La bufera e altro retroactively in light of his poetic hiatus—reading the collection, that is, as an articulation of his growing doubts about poetry and the sense of confinement these doubts produced—we can see the “prison tower” as the poetic form itself, the strictures of the medium that Montale was finding ever more ineffectual. From this “tower” Montale could see much but say nothing, but La bufera e altro offers glimpses of his eventual method of liberation: opera.

Notes 1. Gianfranco Contini described this book as a long poem of separation and longing. Contini writes about Le Occasioni: “Ce livre, tout consacré, comme nous l’écrivait un jour Montale en employant le mot de Shakespeare, à un ‘Only Begetter,’ est en somme un long poème de l’absence et de la séparation, non seulement de l’absence et de la séparation physique de la femme aimée, mais d’une Absence et d’une Séparation qui pour être dominantes et exclusives, en deviennent métaphysiques. C’est le sort de tout amor de lonh.” Gianfranco Contini, “Pour Présenter Eugenio Montale,” Una lunga fedeltà (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 70. 2. Alberto Bertoni and Jonathan Sisco, Montale vs. Ungaretti (Rome: Carocci, 2003), 236.

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3. Roberto Orlando, “Il tema del prigioniero in Montale: note sulla traduzione della ‘Storia di Billy Budd’ di H. Melville,” Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana 21, no. 1 (1992): 107–114. The ballad was the original nucleus of the novel that would become Billy Budd (1924). In the final chapter of the novel, this ballad is reprised as a memory of the novel’s protagonist. Montale translates Melville’s ballad as “Billy in catene,” and his translation is included in Quaderno di traduzioni. The novel, with the title Storia di Billy Budd, was published by Bompiani in 1942. According to Orlando, Montale translated the novel in 1941, during the composition of Finisterre. Orlando, 109. 4. Lonardi explores this idea in “Leonora, Manrico e il fiore dell’addio,” Il fiore dell’addio (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 199–236. 5. Il fiore dell’addio, 231: “Montale’s metaphysical prisoner feels the physical breath of history on his neck . . . questioning facts and historical events with an urgency unheard of before La bufera.” 6. This long hiatus, interrupted officially with the publication of Satura in 1971, divides Montale’s work in two distinct parts. He thought of (what would be eventually released as) Opera in versi as a single book, the early collections of which, up until La bufera e altro, he called the book’s recto and the following works the verso: “Ho scritto un solo libro di cui prima ho dato il recto ora do il verso” (I wrote one single book. I first released the front side and now I’m releasing the back side).From an interview by Giorgio Zampa for the journal Il giornale nuovo, June 27, 1975. Montale, Sulla poesia, 606. 7. Glauco Cambon, “Montale dantesco e bruegelliano” Aut-aut 35 (1956): 371–91. The article was also published in English: Cambon, “Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: A Meeting of Dante and Brueghel,” The Sewanee Review 66.1 (1958): 1–32. Cambon later revised the original piece as “Montale e l’Altro,” La lotta con Proteo (Milan: Bompiani, 1963). 8. Triumph of Death is one of a series of early allegorical paintings from the 1550s and 1560s—works that mix realistic and fantastical elements, with hints of burlesque, inspired in part by the earlier Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516). This group of paintings includes Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559), and Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562). Even though it may be incorrect to describe these paintings as a cycle, they present common characteristics, both thematic and stylistic. See “Bruegel, Pieter or Peter, the Elder,” Oxford Art Online, 2011-10-31, Oxford University Press, accessed March 7, 2018, < h t t p : / / w w w. o x f o r d a r t o n l i n e . c o m / v i e w / 1 0 . 1 0 9 3 / benz/9780199773787.001.0001/acref-9780199773787-e-00027554> 9. The poem was first published in Vittorini’s Il politecnico 1, vol. 6 (November 3, 1945): 1. The poem was introduced by a short note, in which the poet

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reconstructs the situation that prompted the composition of this poem, confirming that the tower of the title is, in fact, his house in Monterosso. Montale, L’opera in versi, 949–50. 10. L’opera in versi, 208: “I saw, filtering through stained- / glass windows and mullioned flowers, / a world of skeletons—and a blood- / red lip go dumb.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 229. 11. The relationship between Dante and Montale (as well as Montale’s contribution to scholarship on Dante) had been explored before Cambon, but not without lacunae. Gaia Tomazzoli offers a rigorous and comprehensive synthesis of the crucial contributions to a discussion on the Montale-Dante rapport in the long essay “Montale e Dante: La questione critica,” Linguistica e letteratura 1–2 (2013): 235–298. Cambon was the first scholar to show Dante’s centrality in shaping Montale’s third book, in particular in the representation of history and its impact on the poet’s language. Dante exerted a varied influence on Montale throughout the entire L’opera in versi, but as Zygmunt Baranski stresses, “the Golden age of Dante’s presence in Montale’s verse are the years 1940–43.” Zygmunt Baranski, “Dante and Montale: The Threads of Influence,” Dante Comparisons (1985): 30. Overall, the critic recognizes a memorial approach to Dante as a source, rather than a programmatic operation, underscoring the occasional presence of textual references from the Commedia. Baranski, “Dante and Montale,” 25. 12. In a note to the volume La bufera e altro,  Montale wrote: “Hitler e Mussolini a Firenze. Serata di gala al teatro Comunale. Sull’Arno, una nevicata di farfalle bianche” (Hitler and Mussolini in Florence. Gala evening at the Teatro Comunale. On the Arno, a snowfall of white butterflies). Montale, Opera in versi, 966. 13. In its entirety, Hitler’s visit to Italy spanned May 3–9 of 1938. The goal of his trip was to formally offer Italy a pact of alliance, one that would eventually be known as the Iron Pact. The relationship between Germany and Italy had been cold since 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed Führer. One object of particular contention was Germany’s ambition to annex Austria. The relationship between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy became closer in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, in which the two powers fought as allies of Francisco Franco’s troops. Hitler, who nurtured artistic ambitions, also conceived of his visit to Italy as the equivalent of a Grand Tour of the country’s monuments. 14. A vivid document that reconstructs Hitler’s visit in Florence is Roberto Mancini, Liturgie totalitarie: Apparati e feste per la visita di Hitler e Mussolini a Firenze (1938) (Firenze, Le Cariti: 2010). 15. The epigraph of the poem (“Né quella ch’a veder lo sol si gira…”)  is extrapolated from a letter attributed by Contini to Dante and addressed to

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the fourteenth-century poet Giovanni Quirini. The reference is to Clizia and her mythological origin in the heliotrope, also mentioned in the third stanza of the poem. As far as concerns the Dantesque elements, Zygmunt Baranski wrote about “La primavera hitleriana”: “[It] is a poem, again a unique example, which heavily borrows from and almost entirely leans on a wide range of Dantean loci.” He also adds: “[In] the most anti-fascist composition that Montale wrote, Dante’s text acts as a co-addresser and a co-­accuser.” Baranski, “Dante e Montale,” 21. That said, Dantesque textual reference had certainly appeared in the poems of Ossi di seppia through the filters of other poets such as Pascoli, Gozzano, and even D’Annunzio. And Dante, as well as dolce stilnovo poetry in general, had inspired the depictions of female figures in Le occasioni. But, as Montale recounted, he indeed fully rediscovered Dante only later in life, at the time of La bufera’s  composition, largely influenced  by T.  S. Eliot’s reading of the medieval poet. Montale would laud Dante as the highest exemplar of Italian poetry and found in the Commedia a powerful lens through which to view the horrors of World War II and its aftermath. Not incidentally, the “storm” of the book’s title is a reference to Dante’s “bufera infernal che mai non resta” in the famous Canto of Paolo and Francesca (see Baranski, “Dante and Montale,” 26). 16. L’opera in versi, 248: “Dense, the white cloud of moths whirling / crazily around the feeble streetlights and parapets / strews on the pavement a shroud that crunches like sugar / underfoot; now the looming summer frees / the night frost held / in the dead season’s caves.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 269. 17. This angel ought to be juxtaposed to the angelic appearance of Clizia, who will make her last appearance in Montale’s poetry in this very poem. 18. L’opera in versi, 248: “Minutes past a demon angel zoomed down the street / through aisles of hailing assassins; suddenly a Hellmouth yawned, lurid, / draped with hooked crosses, seized him, gulped him down.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 269. 19. One of the most prominent innovations of the Bayreuth opera house was its orchestra pit, concealed from the public by a hood and partially recessed under the stage. The principal goal of this invention was to put emphasis on the dramatic action, and it subsequently became a convention associated with Wagner. 20. The Treccani encyclopedia’s definition of “golfo mistico” underscores the common association of the lowered orchestra pit with Wagner: “…espressione che traduce liberamente il tedesco mystisches Abgrund, propr. ‘abisso mistico,’ con cui R.  Wagner denominò il recinto orchestrale del teatro costruito, secondo le sue idee, a Bayreuth.” See also Laurence Dreyfus,

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“Sunk in the Mystic Abyss: Wagner’s ‘Choral’ Orchestra,” in Choruses: Ancient and Modern (Oxford University Press, 2013), 225–42. 21. Rosita Tordi examines the complex and contradictory relationship with Wagner in “Wagner e Nietzsche nella costellazione del primo Montale,” Montale europeo, 45–62. A quick survey of Montale’s musical reviews offers important insight into the nature of this relationship. In Montale’s reviews of Wagner’s operas, there is no direct trace of a political interpretation of the composer, also because the vast majority of reviews, later collected in Prime alla scala postdated World War II. In a 1955 review of Die Walküre (The Valkyrie, 1870), the poet complained about the tendency of Italian performers to present German translations of Wagner’s operas. Montale, Arte, musica, società, 546. In 1960, Montale appears to be mocking the epic ambitions of Wagner’s Christian leanings in Parsifal. Montale, Arte, musica, società, 728–29. Finally, when commenting on a 1964 performance of Tristan Und Isolde, Montale maintains his tone of mockery, when he dismisses the blind faith of Wagner scholars as outdated. Montale, Arte, musica, società, 851. However, his positions on the composer remain ambivalent and are mostly focused on the artistic qualities of Wagner’s operas. Montale finds Wagner’s operas pedantic and repetitive, attacking his idea of the total work of art. Nonetheless, he recognizes his influence on subsequent generations of composers and on Western music in general. 22. As Bertoni puts it: “Firenze era allora la vera capitale letteraria e culturale d’Italia, per la presenza concomitante di riviste decisive per lo svecchiamento e l’apertura europea della nostra cultura” (Florence was then the true literary and cultural capital of Italy, thanks to the concurrent presence of journals that were instrumental for the renovation of Italian culture and its opening toward European influences). Bertoni, Montale vs Ungaretti, 156. 23. Montale, Opera in versi, 256: “All for nothing then?—and the Roman / candles in San Giovanni slowly blanching / the horizon, and the vows, and the long farewells / strong as any christening in the sad, sullen waiting / for the horde” Trans. Arrowsmith, 269. 24. Lonardi, Il fiore dell’addio, 199. 25. LEONORA Over the horrid tower, Ah death seems With wings of darkness To be poised. . . Ah perhaps these doors Will be opened for him Only when his corpse Is already cold! MANRICO I’m paying with my blood

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For the love I bore you! Don’t forget, Don’t forget me, Leonora! Farewell, Leonora, farewell! LEONORA Forget you! Forget you! Trans. W. Weaver, 143. 26. In this poem, the train car that takes the poet away from his lover is described as a prison (again pointed out by Lonardi). When the theme of the distance between the poet and his lover appears in “Mottetti,” it is often presented as a variation on the classical myth of Orpheus. Diego Bertelli best explored the orphic elements in Mottetti in “‘Lo sai: debbo riprenderti e non posso’: il percorso di Orfeo nei Mottetti di Montale,” La casa dei doganieri 2–3 (2009): 77–98. 27. L’opera in versi, 148: “The flower on the cliff’s / edge with its refrain / forget-me-not / has no color brighter, more gay, / than the space flung down between you and me.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 159. 28. “Ballata scritta in una clinica” was first published in the journal Il ponte 1, vol. 5 (August 1945): 399–400. 29. L’opera in versi, 209: “—but for us, darkness, and terror, / loggias and bridges collapsing / upon us, buried like Jonah / in the whale’s belly—” Trans. Arrowsmith, 229. 30. “I wait for a sign, if it’s time / for the last ecstasy. / I’m ready for it now, the penitence / already beginning in the hollow / sobbing of the valleys and ravines / of the other emergency.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 231. Italics mine. The same operatic moment contributes to the central image of the motet “Addii, fischi nel buio, cenni, tosse”: “Addii, fischi nel buio, cenni, tosse / e sportelli abbassati. È l’ora. Forse / gli automi hanno ragione. Come appaiono / dai corridoi murati.” The line “È l’ora” (italics mine) cites Cavaradossi’s line before his execution. The use of the noun “cenno” (sign), echoes yet another moment from the same scene: “CARCERIERE: Vi resta un’ora. Un sacerdote i vostri cenni attende” (You have one hour left. A priest awaits your nod). Tosca, III.2. 31. JAILER It is time! CAVARADOSSI I am ready TOSCA ‘Remember… at the first shot… down… CAVARADOSSI Down! TOSCA Do not get up until I call you… CAVARADOSSI No, my love! TOSCA And fall down well… CAVARADOSSI Like Tosca on stage 32. In discussing T. S. Eliot, in his essay “Invito a T. S. Eliot,”Montale writes: “Il teatro, arte impura, non può essere né sola lirica né solo gioco dialettico

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di idee, ma una situazione risolta in musica, un felice, fatale incontro di cielo e terra, di piattezza e sublimità che è sempre assai raro e che non sempre (un nome insegni: Verdi) appare sul teatro di prosa” (Theater, an impure art, cannot be either just poetry or a dialectical game of ideas, but a situation resolved in music, a happy, fatal encounter of heaven and earth, of dullness and sublimity that is always very rare and not always [sole exception: Verdi] appears on the stage of prose theater). Montale, Sulla poesia, 457. 33. Montale writes: “Tutto il nostro Risorgimento è stato accompagnato dal tantan di poeti civili, ma il più grande poeta di quella lunga stagione è Giuseppe Verdi. Non abbiamo avuto un poeta o prosatore di tale statura” (Our entire Risorgimento has been accompanied by the tam-tam of civil poets, but the greatest poet of that long season is Giuseppe Verdi. We did not have a poet or prose writer of this stature). Montale, Sulla poesia, 152. 34. Montale, Sulla poesia, 562: “I believe I am one of the few surviving today who understand our opera. To Verdi we owe the surprising reappearance, in the midst of the nineteenth century, of a few sparks of the fire of Dante and Shakespeare. It doesn’t matter that it’s usually mixed up with the fire of Victor Hugo.” Trans. Galassi, 297. 35. Montale, Opera in versi, 264: “From that day on I’ve felt my war / with evil won, my sins repaid. / A flame burned and burned; on your roof, / on mine, I saw the horror spilling over.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 289. 36. AZUCENA The flame crackles! The unrestrained mob runs to that fire, their faces all happy! ... The flame crackles! The victim arrives, dressed in black, disheveled, barefoot! 37. Behind that emphasis on the sense of watching, one can detect the echo of the “figgere gli sguardi,” another recurring motif that Montale borrows from Verdi’s operas in his earlier poetic collections. 38. Renato Poggioli, The Spirit of the Letter:Essays in European Literature  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 279. In Poggioli’s analysis, Spanish theater of the late Renaissance should be considered not tragedy, but a dramatic form that the most illuminated Spanish poets did not hesitate to define as commedia. The classic tragedy of the French was not properly tragic, with the exception of Racine’s Phèdre (1677). Poggioli also excludes the possibility of a Christian tragedy and discards Goethe’s Faust (1832), which he sees as “a humanistic and ­romantic sublimation of the Christian drama,” in which “the common test of the happy ending, the final redemption, sufficiently demonstrates that it is not a tragedy.” Poggioli, 282.

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39. Poggioli continues: “For the sense of tragedy to be reborn, modern culture must overcome scientism and historicism, and must render more absolute, integral, and acute . . . our consciousness of evil. The traditional Occidental conception of man must be overthrown, particularly the form which it assumes in contemporary thought, because it is just this which prevents poetry from giving shape to an ideal or exemplary type of tragic hero.” Poggioli, 284. 40. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). 41. George Steiner, “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (2004): 1. 42. “The ideal of tragedy in the classical or Shakespearean tradition was challenged not only by the spread of realistic prose, but also by music. In the second half of the nineteenth century, opera puts forward a serious claim to the legacy of tragic drama.” Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 284. 43. For instance, Steiner claims that “where the theatrical is allowed complete rule over the dramatic, we get melodrama.” Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 164. 44. Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 285. 45. Steiner also acknowledges the same characteristics in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Verdi’s Otello. Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 288. 46. Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 288. 47. Poggioli, too, reflects on Nietzsche’s rejection of melodrama as a vehicle for the revival of the tragic spirit: “The dramatic forms produced by Renaissance and Catholic Italy were the pastoral and, later, the melodrama. The latter began as an attempt to reconstruct, even to the musical accompaniment, the ancient Greek tragedy; but the spirit which dominated it from the beginning was that of the eclogue and the idyll. Nietzsche admirably understood this relationship among opera, Italian music, and pastoral poetry; he noted its duration in the epoch of Rousseau, and judged it a phenomenon antithetic to the tragic spirit.” Poggioli, The Spirit of the Letter, 280. In most of his studies, Poggioli explores a dichotomy between the pastoral ideal and its opposite, which he considers to be tragedy. Poggioli sees melodrama as a form of pastoral utopianism, and holds that it, by definition, cannot include the tragic, thus precluding it from the revival of the tragic spirit hoped for by Nietzsche. 48. The two shared a common intellectual background, maintained a close correspondence, and were both protagonists of the cultural circles of 1920s Florence. It should be noted that Poggioli read Finisterre, the first nucleus of La bufera e altro, as a tragedy of historical proportions: “The tragedy envisioned by the poet is purely human and temporal; i.e. historical. ‘Finisterre’ is the borderland between civilization and barbarism . . . the real subject and background of this book is what may be called the Italian apocalypse of the year 1943 and 1944.” Renato Poggioli, Review of

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Finisterre, by Eugenio Montale, Books Abroad 20, vol. 1 (Winter 1947): 100. 49. Later in life, Verdi would move away from his youthful devotion to Shakespeare by favoring Dante. Verdi himself would at one point rate Dante above not only Shakespeare but also Homer and the biblical prophets. In a letter to the noblewoman Giuseppina Negroni Prati Morosini (1824–1909)—hostess of a famous anti-Austrian literary salon and founder of the political journal La perseveranza (Milan, 1860)—Verdi expressed all his admiration for Dante, reacting to a speech by Senator Gaetano Negri in 1896, during the sixth centenary of the poet’s birth: “Dante è proprio il più grande di tutti! Omero, i Tragici greci, Shakespeare, i Biblici, grandi, sublimi, spesso, non sono così universali, né così completi” (Dante is really the greatest of all! Homer, the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, the Bible, while great and sublime, often, they are neither so universal nor so complete). I copialettere, July 18, 1896, 372. But this enchantment with Dante came only later in the composer’s life, as Massimo Mila has shown—after the composition of Falstaff (1893) and Verdi’s renunciation of opera to return to the religious music with which his career had begun. Mila also mentions Verdi’s project to write an opera based on the Count Ugolino episode (Inferno XXXIII) of the Commedia. In 1789, Verdi composed a “Pater Noster” and an “Ave Maria,” adapting minor works composed originally by Dante—some (Gatti) argue that this prayer is adapted from the prayer in Purgatorio X.  The Laudi allaVergine Maria from Verdi’s Quattro pezzi sacri(1898) is from the prayer by Saint Bernard to the Virgin Mary, the first 21 verses of Paradiso XXXIII. 50. The letter to Cammarano was dated February 28, 1850 (I copialettere, 477–483). 51. William Shakespeare wrote a historical tetralogy; the second and third part focus on the reign of Henry IV. Shakespeare wrote Henry IV—part I in 1597 and Henry IV—part II in 1599: they are both included in the First Folio of 1623. The character of Sir John Falstaff, a comedic and ineffective knight, first appeared in the Henry IV plays. The character features prominently in the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, first published in 1602. The principal inspiration for Verdi’s Falstaff, Sir John Falstaff has inspired several other operas and plays. Garry Wills examined Verdi’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedies in his seminal Verdi’s Shakespeare: Man of the Theater (New York: Viking, 2011). 52. Montale seems keen to underscore an affinity between himself and Verdi, through Dante and Shakespeare. As far as concerns Dante, his work is a point of reference in the composition of Le occasioni, while Dantean ­references appear everywhere in La bufera. During the composition of Finisterre (1943–1945), the book that eventually became the first section

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of La bufera ealtro, he published his translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets. But it was in between his second and third book that Montale’s interest in Dante came to full fruition, particularly through the allegorical interpretation of the critic Gianfranco Contini and his reading of T. S. Eliot. Also, the poet seems to create a connection between Verdi and himself, through the filter of Dante and Shakespeare, two authors who profoundly shaped his poetry in this phase. I already mentioned the importance of Dante for the development of this phase of Montale’s poetry. Montale translated Shakespeare sonnets, but always admired and considered the Commedia a model of great tragedy. 53. In 1939, after being fired from his position as head of the prestigious “Gabinetto Vieusseux” (Vieusseux Cabinet), Montale began activity as a translator, in order to support himself and his family. His first translations, mostly from the English and French, appeared in several publications and periodicals. Most of his poetic translations were later collected in Quaderno di traduzioni, published in 1948, later included in Opera in versi. Shakespeare is the poet that features most prominently, with a number of sonnets and passages form his tragedies. Montale translated Hamlet in 1943 for the actor Romano Cialente. His translation was later published in 1949 by the publisher Cederna-Vallecchi, in Milan. 54. In addition to Shakespeare, Montale also saw Dante as a “great poet of tragedies.” “Dante ieri e oggi,” Sulla poesia, 18. 55. Shakespeare, that is, led Montale to appreciate what I have stressed from Chap. 2: that the origins of opera lie in tragedy, a genre that has always contained within it the ambition to revive the tragedies of ancient Greece. It had long been hypothesized that Greek tragedy was a special synthesis of different artistic forms: when Galileo Galilei’s father—Vincenzo Galilei (1533–1591)—discovered a set of Ancient Greek hymns, it was speculated that they were performed to the accompaniment of music. Vincenzo Galilei included some of the most ancient examples of Greek poetry in his Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna (Dialogue about Ancient and Modern Music, 1581). However, not all scholars agree on the origins of Italian opera as an attempt to revive Greek tragedy. For instance, Massimo Mila reconstructs the origins of Italian melodrama, underscoring the quality of invention in the context of sixteenth-century relationships between theater and music. Mila underscores the desire to move away from three centuries of polyphonic music and underplays the Florentine Camerata belief in the possibility of reviving Greek tragedy. “La nascita del melodramma,” Il Sei-­Settecento: Libera cattedra di storia della civiltà fiorentina (Firenze: Sansoni, 1957), 169–194. Galilei belonged to the Florentine Camerata (the “Camerata de’ Bardi”), a circle of influential scholars, artists, musicians, and scientists, and it was in the Camerata’s experimenta-

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tions with creating a new art form that would unite all others (music, poetry, theater, and dance) that opera originated (developing out of the stile recitativo that the Camerata is now known for). 56. In reviewing an Italian anthology (W. H. Auden, Poesie [Milan: Guanda, 1952]), Montale acknowledges Auden as one of the most formidable English poets of his generation, focusing in particular on his existentialism. Montale praises in particular his qualities as author of opera librettos. “W. H. Auden,” Sulla poesia, 474–481. 57. Igor Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. The opera premiered on September 11, 1951 at the Teatro La Fenice, in Venice. 58. W. H. Auden, “Notes on Music and Opera,” The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Random House, 1962), 468–469. 59. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, 469. 60. “The word melodrama means, originally, a drama accompanied by music. It appears to have first been used by Rousseau, to describe a play in which he sought a new emotional expressivity through the mixture of spoken soliloquy, pantomime, and orchestral accompaniment . . . The emotional drama needs the desemanticized language of music, its evocation of the ‘ineffable,’ its tones and registers. Style, thematic structuring, modulations of tone and rhythm and voice—musical patterning in a metaphorical sense—are called upon to invest plot with the inexorability and necessity that in pre-modern literature derived from the substratum of myth.” Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 14. 61. Brooks adds: “In considering melodrama, we are in a sense talking about a form of theatricality which will underlie novelistic efforts at representations—which will provide a model for the making of meaning in fictional dramatizations of existence.” Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 12. 62. The critic expands on this idea: “The Revolution attempts to sacralize law itself, the Republic as the institution of morality. Yet it necessarily produces melodrama instead, incessant struggle against enemies, without and within, branded as villains . . . melodrama becomes the principal mode for uncovering, demonstrating, and making operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era.” Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 15. 63. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 17. Brooks continues: “Melodrama . . . offers a complete set of attitudes, phrases, gestures coherently conceived toward dramatization of essential spiritual conflict” (20). In what he defines as “classic melodrama,” Brooks underscores a Manichean polarization of good and evil, which reveals that characters are moved by higher, powerful forces. This idea is only marginal to my consideration of opera as a tragic form, with its focus on the novel—by the critic’s own admission, he does “make use of melodrama’s history as it contributes to defining the

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melodramatic mode”(xvii). However, Brooks’ ideas on the relationship between melodrama and tragedy resonate with the theoretical concern of this chapter. He argues that melodrama, with its emphasis on the excess of human actions and reactions, has supplanted a sense of the tragic in contemporary art and society. As Brooks puts it: “Melodrama does not simply represent a ‘fall’ from tragedy, but a response to the loss of the tragic vision” (15). 64. Montale, L’opera in versi, 287: “Self-pity, infinite pain and anguish / of the man who worships this world here and now, / who hopes and despairs of another … / (who dares speak of another world?) / .. .. .. .. .. .. / ‘Strana pietà…’” (Azucena, II). Trans. Arrowsmith, 307. 65. The dotted line in the poem signifies the muteness of his paralysis in the face of choice. It is out of this muteness that he turns back on the operatic repertoire, saying something he can only articulate through the words of Azucena. He does not find a “solution” in opera, but rather a means of expressing his plight—in a sense, this evokes Saba’s Fughe, where opera is not something that resolves inner conflicts, but rather is an instrument that allows these conflicts to be expressed. 66. In this regard, Steiner makes a distinction between horror and tragic terror, by quoting a passage from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. However, the original quote is intended to underscore a sense of identity between the two emotions pointed out by Aristotle as the basis of the tragic catharsis: “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret cause.” Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 164. 67. For Aristotle tragedy aimed at inspiring the sublime by portraying painful and traumatic events: “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” Aristotle, Poetics, VI. According to Aristotle, the essence of tragedy lies in the representation of painful situations, which prepare the viewers for a catharsis. The sense of the tragic corresponds to a process through which one is able to reach into the core of existence, into the real meaning of these situations by sublimating them on the stage of the tragic representation. 68. Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 136. 69. As Pirandello writes, when the two characters talk about the tear in the sky: “gli occhi, sul punto, gli andrebbero lì, a quello strappo, donde ora ogni sorta di mali influssi penetrerebbero nella scena, e si sentirebbe cader le

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braccia. Oreste, insomma, diventerebbe Amleto. Tutta la differenza, signor Meis, fra la tragedia antica e la moderna consiste in ciò.” Pirandello, 136. Italics mine. 70. He announces, that is, his independence from the political and cultural trends he sees around him, even if this disconnect precludes him from writing poetry. 71. Montale, L’opera in versi, 267: “When every other light’s gone out / and the wild sardana turns hellish, / and a dark Lucifer swoops down on the shore / of Thames, Hudson, or Seine / flapping pitchy wings half- / shorn away from his hard toil to tell you: It’s time.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 291. Italics mine. 72. Montale, L’opera in versi, 267: “But a story only survives in ashes, / persistence is only extinction.” Trans. Arrowsmith, 291. 73. In 1761, architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) published a groundbreaking group of etchings entitled “Carceri d’invenzione” (“Imaginary Prisons”). The etchings depicted improbable geometries of shadowy vaults and darkening arches, masonry bridges leading nowhere among ruins and relics from an unfathomable time. The spaces are littered with cranes, chains, and other instruments of torture. In the dimly lit corridors of these prisons, enigmatic figures stand sinister against their vast designs. When he published the Prisons, Piranesi was the foremost “vedutista” (landscape artist) of his time—his uniquely desolate views of Rome fed the Romantic perception of eighteenth-century Italy as a country filled with the ruins of a mysterious and stately classical past. Piranesi’s Prisons left a profound impression on generations of writers, poets, and intellectuals, including Victor Hugo, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, and Marguerite Yourcenar, who wrote an incisive essay casting these prison cells as negations of time and space. See Marguerite Yourcenar, “The Dark Brain of Piranesi,” The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, trans. R. Howard (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984), 88–128. For our purposes, Piranesi’s Prisons provide a starting visual model for the metaphysical imprisonment that pervades Montale’s La bufera e altro, the most challenging and enigmatic book of his L’opera in versi. 74. Montale, L’opera in versi, 268: “Here, except for a few signs, you can’t tell dawn from night. // The zigzag of starlings over the watchtowers / on days of fighting, my only wings, / a thread of arctic air, / the head-guard’s eye at the peephole, / the crack of broken nuts, an oily / sputtering from the basements, roasting spits / imagined or real—but the straw is gold, / the winey lantern is hearth enough for me, / if I can dream I’m sleeping at your feet.” Trans. W. Arrowsmith, 293. 75. Bertoni, Montale vs. Ungaretti, 240.

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76. Montale, Sulla poesia, 579–80: “My prisoner can be a political prisoner; but it can also be a prisoner of the existential condition.” 77. Bertoni suggests a similarity between the theme of poetic language as nourishment as it is formulated by the character of Cacciaguida in Dante’s Paradiso. Bertoni, Poesia del Novecento italiano, 185. But the focus on the gastronomic elements of language, in this peculiar situation, is a clear reference to another crucial moment of Dante’s Commedia: the Count Ugolino episode in Inferno XXXIII. 78. Lonardi, Il fiore dell’addio, 230–31. 79. At the end of the poem, the prisoner pronounces the line: “L’attesa è lunga, il mio sogno di te non è finito.” Here Montale reveals another operatic ascendancy of this dramatic situation, by hinting at yet another moment of Il trovatore, usually not included in performances, the so-called “coro di religiose.” The chorus refers to a scene in Act II, a Shakespearean moment in which Leonora is sung by a group of nuns as she is going to the convent: “Presso a morir, vedrai /  Che un’ombra, un sogno fu, /  Anzi del sogno un’ombra /  La speme di quaggiù!” (Il trovatore, II.3). It must also be noted that the “Sogno” is a key word in Cammarano’s libretto of Il trovatore. Aversano discussed this chorus, although in a different context, in Montale e il libretto d’opera, 16. 80. The motet “Il fiore che ripete,” with its metaphorical funicular cage, represents the mirroring image of “Il sogno del prigioniero.” In this poem, there is no voice, no flower that repeats Manrico’s pledge to Leonora (“Non ti scordar di me…! Leonora, addio!”) in the final act of Il trovatore.

References Primary sources Montale, Eugenio. 1961. Farfalla di Dinard. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1980a.  L’opera in versi,  ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore. ———. 1980b. Mottetti, ed. Dante Isella. Milan: Il Saggiatore. ———. 1981. Prime alla Scala, ed. Gianfranca Lavezzi. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. ———. 1982. The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale, ed. and trans. Jonathan Galassi. New York: The Ecco Press. ———. 1984. Tutte le poesie, ed. Giorgio Zampa. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1996a. Il secondo mestiere: Arte, musica, società, ed. Giorgio Zampa. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1996b. Il secondo mestiere. Vol. 1. Prose (1920–1979), ed. Giorgio Zampa. Milan: Mondadori.

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———. 2009. Satura, ed. Riccardo Castellana. Milan: Mondadori. Pirandello, Luigi. 1988. Il fu Mattia Pascal. Milan: Mondadori. Verdi, Giuseppe. 1913. I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, eds. Gaetano Cesari, Alessandro Luzio, and Michele Scherillo. Milan: Tipografia Stucchi Ceretti & C.

Secondary Sources Auden, Wystan Hugh. 1962. The Dyer’s Hand. New York: Random House. Aversano, Mario. 1984. Montale e il libretto d’opera. Naples: Editrice Ferraro. Baranski, Zygmunt. 1985. Dante and Montale: The Threads of Influence. Dante Comparisons: Comparative Studies of Dante and Montale, Foscolo, Tasso, Chaucer, Petrarch, Propertius, and Catullus, ed. Eric Haywood and Barry Jones, 11–48. Dublin: Irish Academy Press. Bertelli, Diego. 2009. «Lo sai: debbo riperderti e non posso»: il percorso di Orfeo nei Mottetti di Montale. La casa dei doganieri II.2–3: 77–98. Bertoni, Alberto, and Jonathan Sisco. 2003. Montale vs. Ungaretti: Introduzione alla lettura di due modelli di poesia del Novecento. Rome: Carocci. Brooks, Peter. 1976. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cambon, Glauco. 1958. Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: A Meeting of Dante and Brueghel. The Sewanee Review 66 (1): 1–32. ———. 1967. Eugenio Montale’s “Motets”: The Occasion of Epiphany. PMLA 82 (7): 471–484. ———. 1963. La lotta con Proteo. Milan: Bompiani. ———. 1982. Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: A Dream in Reason’s presence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Contini, Gianfranco. 1974. Una lunga fedeltà. Turin: Einaudi. Dreyfus, Laurence. 2013. Sunk in the Mystic Abyss: Wagner’s ‘Choral’ Orchestra. In Choruses: Ancient and Modern, ed. Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, and Fiona Macintosh. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lonardi, Gilberto. 2003. Il fiore dell’addio: Leonora, Manrico e altri fantasmi del melodramma nella poesia di Montale. Bologna: Il Mulino. Mancini, Roberto. 2010. Liturgie totalitarie: Apparati e feste per la visita di Hitler e Mussolini a Firenze (1938). Florence, Le Cariti. Mila, Massimo. 1957. La nascita del melodramma. In Il Sei-Settecento: Libera cattedra di storia della civiltà fiorentina, 169–194. Firenze: Sansoni. Montale, Eugenio. 1976. Sulla poesia. Milan: Mondadori. Orlando, Roberto. 1992. Il tema del prigioniero in Montale: note sulla traduzione della ‘Storia di Billy Budd’ di H. Melville. Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana 21 (1): 107–114. Poggioli, Renato. 1964. Definizione dell’utopia e morte del senso della tragedia: Due saggi di critica delle idee. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi.

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———. 1965. The Spirit of the Letter: Essays in European Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steiner, George. 1961. The Death of Tragedy. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2004. ‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered. New Literary History 35 (1): 1–15. Tomazzoli, Gaia. 2013. Montale e Dante: La questione critica. Linguistica e letteratura 1-2: 235–298. Tordi, Rosita. 2002. Montale europeo. Ascendenze culturali nel percorso montaliano da “Accordi” a “Finisterre” (1922–1943). Rome: Bulzoni editore. Wills, Gary. 2011. Verdi’s Shakespeare: Man of the Theater. New York: Viking. Yourcenar, Marguerite. 1984. The Dark Brain of Piranesi. In The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays. Trans. R.  Howard, 88–128. New  York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

CHAPTER 7

Poetry and the Beast: Giorgio Caproni’s Simulations of Opera

7.1   A Musical Education A unique voice in contemporary Italian poetry, Giorgio Caproni made music a foundation of his poetic inspiration. As was true of the authors analyzed in the previous chapters, he undertook a musical education which left profound imprints on his poetry, not only through references to composers and their works, but also in the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmical configuration of his poems. Musical elements are present throughout Caproni’s oeuvre, but in the last phase of his career, they become more prominent and central to his creativity.1 As I will explain in this chapter, Caproni sought a form of musical expression in order to evade what he perceived as the ontological limitations of language, with the ultimate objective of expanding the expressive capacities of lyric poetry. As with Saba and Montale, opera occupies a dominant role in Caproni’s musical thematics—it may be seen in his frequent citations of and references to operas and their composers and can be considered an intellectual model for his later poetry. But Caproni presents some distinctive traits that set him apart from the other authors discussed in this book. Parallel to his love for musical techniques, the poet expressed what he defined as a “desire for theater,” and described his last books—the trilogy that comprises Il muro della terra (1975), Il franco cacciatore (1982), and Il conte di Kevenhüller (1986)—as simulations of theater. These books include theatrical elements such as plot devices, dramatic characters, and a © The Author(s) 2020 M. Acetoso, Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46091-4_7

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plurality of voices that create the impression of plays. But the “theatricality” of these books coexists with the poet’s tendency toward musical expression. Operatic echoes punctuate his works, and upon careful analysis, it becomes clear that Caproni’s desire for theater is actually a desire for opera—for dramatic texts set to music. This chapter argues that these books ought to be considered as simulations of opera, as Caproni uses them to test the expressive means of poetry and to aspire to the syncretism found in an art form where music, theater, and narrative converge. As we will see, Il conte di Kevenhüller is arguably Caproni’s most successful simulation, the culmination of a long experimentation with the application of musical and theatrical forms in his poetry. The book centers on a plot: the hunt for an imaginary beast, an allegory for language. The hunt is a recurring motif in Caproni’s work, through which he dramatizes his impossible search for meaning and his metaphysical quest for God. With his aspiration to operatic simulations, Caproni dramatizes his desire for a musical expression that surpasses the limitations of poetic language. Caproni’s gift for poetry and his musical apprenticeship, however, are strongly interconnected. The poet himself described this bond during an interview with RAI (Radiotelevisione italiana, the Italian national broadcasting company) on December 17, 1983. Caproni explained that before poetry, there was music in his life. As an adolescent, Caproni studied composition and learned to play the violin. Part of his training as a composer included writing chorales for four voices, adapting lyrics by Poliziano, Rinuccini, and Tasso. Tired by what he perceived as a repetitive and mechanical task, Caproni began writing and scoring his own words: these became his first poems.2 The poet went on to become a professional musician, playing the violin in ensembles and small dance orchestras (“orchestrine da ballo”), until a nervous breakdown abruptly interrupted his musical career. When he was ultimately forced to abandon music, poetry took its place. Caproni’s journey strongly resembles those of the authors we have seen in the previous chapters: D’Annunzio struggled to become a professional musician, Saba failed to become a violinist, and Montale long dreamed of becoming an opera singer. Their failures had a profound impact on their poetic careers. However, Caproni stands out for the sophistication of his interactions with music and musical forms. Scholars have long underscored the presence of musical elements in Caproni’s poetry. In a 1965 interview, critic Ferdinando Camon went so far as to claim that Caproni’s poetry was music in itself, more specifically “music for the violin”3—an opinion shared by poet Giovanni Raboni.4

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Stefano Vecchi defined Caproni as a “musician of words.”5 While these critics remained quite vague in their assessments, more recent studies have analyzed this aspect of Caproni’s poetry with greater critical acumen and from a variety of angles.6 Rodolfo Zucco, for instance, highlighted the influence of seventeenth-century melic tradition in Caproni’s early poems; Alberto Alfredo Tristano explored references to Mozart in the poet’s later books; and Ulderico Pietrantonio analyzed Caproni’s musical metaphors and the harmonic structure of his poems. This last strain of analysis has been among the most successful and convincing. Giancarlo Russo has analyzed what he defines as the musicality of Caproni’s poems, meaning the prevalence of phonetic elements over semantic ones.7 Russo explains that Caproni relies heavily on rhetorical figures of sound (rhymes, assonances, alliterations) as well as rhythm (enjambments, repetition). He claims that the prevalence of acoustic elements is not just an accessory of Caproni’s poetry but an embodiment of the poet’s ambition to create music with words.8 While applauding the work of these scholars, this chapter aims at expanding their conclusions. I see the last phase of Caproni’s poetry as a progressive approach toward operatic forms. Caproni confronts a crisis of poetic expression, to which he responds by dramatizing his inner conflicts. We can better understand this process by looking back at Montale and Saba. In Chap. 4, we saw that Montale sought to go beyond semantics, looking for a musical expression by imitating musical forms. Saba dramatized his inner conflicts through the characters and the operatic voices of his fugues. Caproni’s simulations of opera exist at the intersection of the two approaches. Caproni chose to dramatize (as Saba did) a sense of crisis toward poetic expression that also characterized Montale’s early poetry. I will explore this point in the following pages, by first reflecting on Caproni’s ideas on language and poetry and then examining their intersection with his musical education.

7.2   The Crisis of Language Music figures in Caproni’s poetry from his earliest collections. It is the subject of many of the poems of Ballo a Fontanigorda (1938), his first book—for instance, “Sagra” is an impressionistic portrait of a country festival, with songs and dances.9 But references to music and musical forms, especially in the titles of his poems, recur throughout his work. In Il muro della terra and the following books, Caproni frequently includes

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musical directions (such as Cantabile, Andantino, or Allegretto), offering his reader instructions on how to read these poems. This thinking of poetry “musically,” however, extends to the harmonic construction of single poems. For instance, in Finzioni (1941), Caproni begins experimenting with conventional forms, such as the sonetto and the canzonetta, focusing in particular on the metrical qualities of his poems—his effort echoes Saba’s and Montale’s previous attempts to bend these forms to their desire for a musical expression, as we have seen in the previous chapters. As Rosso notes, Sonetti dell’anniversario reflects the poet’s intention to make music with words rather than notes.10 However, Caproni never sought to imitate musical forms and fiercely rejected the idea that his poetry was equivalent to music, since one art cannot be another art form, and finds the comparison a simplification—indeed, in Chap. 4, we saw the dangers of discussing the musicality of poetry, an art that by definition contains its own music.11 Pietrantonio gives a better assessment of his attempt. Caproni aspires to access a specific dimension of music, which he conceives as pure thought without words (“pensiero puro senza le parole”).12 According to Pietrantonio, Caproni relies on the acoustic qualities of poetry to best capture his ideas, in order to be able to overcome what he perceived as the semantic limitations of everyday language. This point is key for a proper understanding of the music of Caproni’s work and is rooted in the poet’s viewpoints on language and poetry. In his critical writings, Caproni articulated his deep dissatisfaction with language and expressed the desire to be able to go beyond words.13 Ultimately, Caproni claimed to aspire to the “freedom” of music from the limitations of semantics.14 He often described his acute sense of distrust toward what he defined as “logical language,” that is, any form of language that aims to describe reality. In his opinion, words had no relationship with the phenomenal world and no ability to help us understand what is real. He best synthesized this view in a poem entitled “Le parole” (“Words,” from Il franco cacciatore): Le parole. Già. Dissolvono l’oggetto. Come la nebbia gli alberi, il fiume: il traghetto. (“Le parole,” 1–4)15

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Words are compared to a fog (a recurring theme of Caproni’s poetry) that swallows the trees, the river, and the ferry in an undetermined landscape. Language obscures reality and cannot create a connection between subject and object. Poetry, however, represents an exception. In his theoretical writings, Caproni makes a clear distinction between logical and poetic language, explaining that poetry possesses its own code: “La forma più alta e libera del linguaggio (la poesia) è una realtà distinta dalla natura—una vera e propria altra realtà che pur essendo indotta da quella originale a non collimare mai, nemmeno un punto del linguaggio (una parola) con un solo punto della parola (una cosa).”16 Poetry does not aspire to represent reality, but generates another, one without connection to the phenomenal world. Caproni claims that poetry is more truthful than logic precisely because it creates its own reality. In the essay “Poesia chiara e poesia oscura” (“Clear Poetry and Obscure Poetry”), Caproni underscored the lack of logic in poetry and challenged the very need for it to be comprehensible. His distinction between clear and obscure poetry evokes Saba’s dichotomy between honest and dishonest poetry (in “Quello che resta da fare ai poeti,” as seen in Chap. 3). But while Saba attacked what he defined as the “dishonesty” of the previous generation of poets and professed a need for clarity, Caproni justified poetry’s obscurity. Reading a poem literally—as one would read a novel, or a newspaper, in search of a logical meaning—was a mistake, Caproni claimed. Every poem, when read literally, becomes incomprehensible. That is because the domain of poetry is not logic, but emotion. For Caproni, words in a poem are not intended as logical tools to comprehend reality; they are sources (“polle”) of emotions, signs with no equivalent in the phenomenal world. Therefore, words in poetry do not possess any logic; they simply generate emotions. Only when poetry touches our feelings can we truly understand in a way that surpasses the limits of logic (or lack thereof). In Caproni’s words: In realtà in poesia (come del resto in musica o in pittura o in qualsiasi altra espressione artistica) non si tratta tanto di capire ma di sentire, e perciò, una volta sentito, di capire davvero con una profondità (o altezza) infinitamente superiore a quella in cui avrebbe potuto inabissarci (o innalzarci) il più logico dei discorsi logici.17

Caproni uses the verb “sentire,” with full awareness of the ambiguity of the term. In Italian, it can be translated as both “to feel” and “to hear.”

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This very ambiguity underscores the connection that Caproni conceives between the sense of hearing and human feelings, giving us a further hint as to the centrality of the acoustic dimension of his poetry. As Pietrantonio most clearly explains, the musical dimension of Caproni’s poetry is hermeneutic: hearing is equivalent to feeling, that is, to knowing in poetry.18 This very equivalence is the basis of the connection that Caproni seeks to establish between poetry and music. Only through a specific harmonic configuration of words within a poem—what could be termed as their music—can a poet communicate to a reader his or her ideas, that is, share his or her own emotions, which form the real common denominator between poetry and music. While everyday communications use a linguistic code that is common to everyone, Caproni explains, poetry uses a language that is open to a number of meanings, often unpredictable, beyond the literal. In order to best convey this idea, he compares the polysemy of poetry to the musical theory of harmonic series: Mentre nel linguaggio pratico il segnale acustico o grafico della parola resta stretto alla lettera e alla pura e semplice informazione, nel linguaggio poetico la parola stessa conserva, sì, il proprio senso letterale, ma anche si carica di una serie pressoché infinità di significati “armonici” (e dico armonici usando il termine com’è usato nella fisica e nella musica) che ne forma la sua peculiare forza espressiva.19

The theory of harmonic series is based on the understanding of the physical performance of music. Every note, when played on a musical instrument, generates a number of notes along the harmonic scale. For instance, a C played on the string of a violin also produces other notes of the major scale (C, E, G, etc.). Some string musicians, including guitarists and violinists, use harmonic series as a musical technique in their performances. Caproni is vague in articulating what he means exactly by “armonici della parola poetica,” referring more generally to the ability of a word to acquire a number of meanings beyond the literal depending on its position within a poem.20 In more general terms, Caproni alludes to the polysemy of poetic words. His analogy, however, best explains some of his most frequent “musical strategies,” such as repetitions, a limited vocabulary, and a consistent use of rhymes, enjambments, and assonances.21

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7.3   A Desire for Theater While present throughout his work, Caproni’s musical aspirations become more systematic in the last phase of his poetry, in particular in the trilogy that comprises Il muro della terra, Il franco cacciatore, and Il conte di Kevenhüller.22 The thematic architecture of these works provides an organizing principle for heterogeneous poems, creating a macrostructure that compensates for the lack of a proper thematic center. This organization is eminently musical, as we will see. The first book of the trilogy, entitled Il muro della terra (Ramparts of the City), is a collection of poems written between 1964 and 1975. The title is a reference to the walls that surround the city of Dis in Dante’s Inferno X. In this canto, Dante and Virgil walk a narrow path between the city and a field of graves, where the heretics are punished. Caproni himself explained that the wall of his book’s title symbolizes the limits of human logic, underscoring the continuity with the general sense of crisis in his poetry that we saw earlier.23 However, the Dantean reference is not incidental, since Caproni presents himself, in this book, as a “heretic”—one of the central themes of Il muro della terra is the impossible quest to find God, often described as a hidden presence, as in the poem “Deus absconditus.”24 The 13 sections of this book explore such themes as death and human mortality, the uselessness of human existence, and the impossibility of finding meaning. Most importantly, Il muro della terra is Caproni’s work in which music and poetry interact most explicitly and fruitfully. The textual and rhetorical strategies that I pointed to at the beginning of this chapter as part of the music in Caproni’s poetry become a systemic presence. The musical imagination that inspired Il muro della terra is revealed, in particular, by the titles of many of its poems. The first section, for instance, is entitled “Tre vocalizzi prima di cominciare” (“Three Vocal Exercises Before Beginning”). A “vocalizzo” is a short piece of vocal music that consists of a melody made with vowel sounds without words— it is often used as a warm up exercise by singers. After the dedication “Quasi ad aulica dedica” (“Almost a Solemn Dedication”), three poems introduce one of the main themes of the book: the author’s metaphysical quest for meaning and the role of music in containing the absurdity and contradictions of human existence. The first poem “Falsa indicazione” (“False indication”), a simple quatrain of novenarios, dramatizes the limits of language in decoding the experience of the phenomenal world:

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“Confine,” diceva il cartello. Cercai la dogana. Non c’era. Non vidi, dietro il cancello, ombra di terra straniera. (“Falsa indicazione,” 1–4)25

The poem is a short narrative of a poet-subject who reaches an imaginary border, which is erroneously indicated by a signboard. The sign “confine” (“border”), however, is incorrect and does not correspond to reality: there is no actual border and beyond the gate no indication of a foreign land. The liminal place immortalized in the poem has no real geographical location; it is rather the symbol of an impossible metaphysical quest. Caproni introduces this scene of linguistic deception to capture the elusive nature of reality. The second vocalizzo, “Tristissima copia ovvero quarantottesca” (“Very Sad Copy or Quarantottesca”) best encapsulates Caproni’s use of repetitions and rhymes in light of his theory of musical harmonics: Partivan tutti e addio. e addio e addio e a Dio. Soltanto chi non partiva (io) partiva in quel rimescolio. (“Tristissima copia ovvero quarantottesca,” 1–4)26

The poet repeats the word “addio” (“farewell”) three times, before introducing the variation “a Dio” (“to God”) and the subject “io” (“I”). With the apparently absurdist image of this poem, Caproni explores the different harmonics of the word Dio (Addio, Dio, Io). The poet uses a similar strategy in the poem “Lo stravolto,” where the nonsensical repetition of the word Dio and the pronoun “io” (“I”) create a phonetic and semantic counterpoint, suggesting that God may or may not live inside of us, or may not exist at all, being a construction of our mind.27 The meter, the use of punctuation, and the use of rhymes in these poems evoke Saba’s most popular (and musical) poems. As we saw in Chap. 5, the musical organization of Saba’s poems helped the poet contain and represent the conflict within his soul. Here, comparable techniques serve to express Caproni’s conflicted relationship with the sacred in his metaphysical quest for meaning. In Il muro della terra the abundant musical lexicon helps to underscore the complexity of such a relationship. Caproni uses musical directions to guide his reader’s attention to the

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“performance” of his poems. We can see one example of Caproni’s musical imagination at work in the poem “In eco”: (piano) (Qualcuno avrà anche gridato, nel bosco. Chi l’ha ascoltato.) (fortissimo) Ma—tutti!—hanno cantata Vittoria, prima del rantolo. (“In eco,” 1–6)28

The title already draws the reader’s attention to the acoustic performance of the poem.29 The dynamic (piano) of the first distich collides with the scream heard in the woods portrayed in the first line. The second distich emphasizes the absurdity of singing “victory” before death. Caproni underscores this contradiction with a musical crescendo, almost a musical “explosion,” from piano to fortissimo. Other poems present similar uses of musical directions and dynamics,30 sometimes in their titles: “Cantabile (ma stonato),” “Coda alla confessione,” “Andantino,” and “Arpeggio,” to mention a few. These titles direct the reading of these poems, often in contrast with their actual tone, thus underscoring a contradiction and a paradox. The poem “Cadenza” functions in a similar way,31 but introduces in this process a powerful musical analogy deeply implicated in Caproni’s ideas on poetry and language: Tonica, terza, quinta. Settima diminuita. Rimane così irrisolto L’accordo della mia vita? (“Cadenza,” 1–4)32

This poem adds yet another dimension to a musical understanding of Caproni’s poetry. The poet suggests an analogy between his life (meaning his existential quest) and a diminished seventh chord. This dissonant chord is used to portray situations of pathos, surprise, terror, and anxiety. A diminished seventh chord instills a sense of tragic suspension, of irresolution, as well as ambiguity—key emotions in Caproni’s poetry. This chord consists of four notes: tonic, minor third, minor fifth, plus a diminished seventh note (e.g. the notes of a Cdim7 chord are: C, D#, F#, A). All four notes of a diminished seventh chord are separated from each other by an

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interval of a minor third. This means that every note within the chord could be the tonic of another diminished seventh chord, which contains the same notes of the original tonic. As already explained, Caproni was a fine connoisseur of musical harmony, and it is likely he used this chord with full awareness of its internal logic. The structural characteristics of this poem capture Caproni’s ambivalent relationship with the expressive means of poetry and reflect his attempt to overcome the limitations of language that the he describes in his writings. Caproni’s love for music extends beyond the imitation of musical techniques; it also manifests itself in citations and references to specific musical works, most notably vocal music and opera. Il muro della terra contains one of the most explicit operatic references in Caproni’s L’opera in versi, hinting at the poet’s vast knowledge and appreciation of this genre.33 The poem “Su un’eco stravolta della traviata” (“On a distorted echo of La traviata”), as the title suggests, evokes one of the most popular passages of Verdi’s repertoire: Dammi la mano. Vieni. Guida la tua guida. Tremo. Non tremare. Insieme, presto Ritorneremo nel nostro nulla—nel nulla (insieme) Rimoriremo. (“Su un’eco stravolta della traviata,” 1–6)34

The poem consists of a dialogue between two voices—even though these are not indicated typographically as such. The first voice invites the second to follow him/her toward the nothingness (“nulla”) that awaits them both, meaning their death. The distorted echo from La traviata in the title is taken from the famous duet “Parigi, o cara” (“Paris, oh dear”): Parigi, o cara noi lasceremo, la vita uniti trascorreremo: de’ corsi affanni compenso avrai, la tua salute rifiorirà. Sospiro e luce tu mi sarai, tutto il futuro ne arriderà. (La traviata, III.6)35

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This is the last scene of Verdi’s opera. Violetta is sick and Alfredo seeks to offer consolation to his dying lover, promising her that she will survive and that someday they will leave Paris and live a prosperous life together. How does this operatic reference inform our reading of Caproni’s poem? First of all, the duet is one of Verdi’s most famous and comes with a set of expectations: Violetta will die and Alfredo’s promise to live happily ever after is doomed to fall short. In his poem, Caproni reprises an equivalent, although reversed situation. One voice promises the other support against the hardships of life, when in reality they both are facing death, which is portrayed, ad absurdum, as a condition that can be repeated (“Rimoriremo”). The reassuring tone of the first voice is undercut by the tragic, absurd destiny that awaits them. This poem shows Caproni’s different approach to opera, when compared to Saba and Montale, an approach that could be deemed both less reverent and less reliant on precise textual citations. In Caproni, as already hinted by Lonardi, echoes of opera are present but mostly distorted, adapted to the needs of his intellectual quest. In this case, Caproni evokes a popular passage from opera in order to reinforce an image of disillusionment about salvation and death. In other instances, Caproni’s use of operatic sources is apparently more conventional and aligned to that of his predecessors. A number of his poems, in fact, include references to and citations from operas, using those strategies I outlined in the previous chapters in regard to Saba and Montale. Lonardi is usually very attentive to these instances and offers some key examples.36 For instance, in the poem “A una giovane sposa” (“To a Young Bride”), he detects an echo of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. The line “tu che di latte hai gonfio/il petto”37 evokes the opening lines of Mascagni’s opera: “Oh Lola, c’hai di latti la cammisa/si bianca e russa come la cirasa.”38 In the poem “A Rosario,” Verdino detects yet another echo of Mascagni (confirmed by Lonardi), whereas the line “nell’aria nera che brilla/lucida come una pupilla”39 recalls the duet in the finale of the first act of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly: Ah! Dolce notte! Quante stelle! Non le vidi mai si belle! Trema, brilla ogni favilla Col baglior d’una pupilla (Madama Butterfly, I)40

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Lonardi suggests that the influence of opera on Caproni does not consist exclusively of textual citations, but also extends to the poet’s choice of meters, in particular his frequent use of novenarios and ottonarios, a choice inspired by opera librettos.41 This idea and the textual references mentioned above are convincing; however, they do not fully convey the complexity and scope of Caproni’s relationship with opera and the overall ambition this entails. Francesca Bernard has highlighted the theatricality of Caproni’s last season, drawing attention to the presence of dramatic elements in his poetry, such as the “regression” of the lyrical “I” in favor of a number of characters and voices.42 As we have seen, Caproni himself admitted to what he defined as a desire for theater, describing his later books as theatrical simulations.43 Italo Calvino first highlighted this theatricality, alluding to the presence of characters in Caproni’s poetry and their role in creating some sort of dramatic action.44 Mengaldo best described Caproni’s desire for theater as a tendency to delegate his ideas to characters, doubles of himself. For Mengaldo, it is through this strategy that Caproni seeks to unveil (or underscore) the artificiality of poetry, what Caproni himself describes as poetry’s ability to create its own reality.45 Bernard interpreted this idea as Caproni’s distrust of the conventions of lyric poetry, a sentiment reflected in his tendency to silence the poetic subject by including multiple alter egos in a narrative setting. These are the basic elements of what Caproni defined as a simulation of theater. However, as we have seen, he constantly mixes theatrical and musical elements. Therefore, his later books could be more aptly defined, I believe, as simulations of opera.

7.4   The Hunt While present throughout his poetry, Caproni’s theatricality becomes central to the development of Il franco cacciatore, a collection of poems written between 1973 and 1982. The title of the book, a reference to Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischutz (The Marksman), reveals its musical subtext. Weber (1786–1826) is considered the father of German national opera, known as Singspiel. This popular operatic genre maintains Italian opera’s distinction between aria and recitativo, with a fundamental formal difference: in opera, the recitativo is sung, while in Singspiel it is spoken dialogue. The three-act opera, first performed on June 18, 1821 at the Konzerthaus Berlin, is usually regarded as one of the first and finest works of German Romanticism. The main plot, in fact, is based on German

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folktale traditions. While Caproni encouraged his readers not to overstate the influence of Weber’s opera, he retained a number of elements, including the Bohemian setting and the idea of the hunt, which is both a plot device and a recurring theme of his poetry.46 As Rosso suggests, Caproni made the title of this opera his own,47 making explicit this collection’s indebtedness toward opera, an aspect that emerges also in the poet’s use of characters and in the musical elements that we highlighted in his previous collection.48 In addition, in Il franco cacciatore, poems tend to be shorter and include pauses, blank spaces, and typographical signs that acquire musical connotations. Caproni intends these formal features to denote musical silence, like a pause between two notes or a break between musical phrases. The musical subtext, like in Il muro della terra, helps the poet find an effective and immediate expression of the metaphysical conflict that is central to his worldview and theological quest. This idea is best conveyed by the poem “Coretto (di giubilo) dei chierichetti” (“Coretto of Jubilation of the Altar Boys”): Orsù, cantiam, cantiamo. Cantiamo con voce giuliva. La nascita provvisoria. La morte definitiva. (“Coretto [di giubilo] dei chierichetti,” 1–4)49

The poem is an invitation to sing joyfully about the central contradiction of the human condition: the temporariness of life and the permanency of death. Everything is framed by yet another musical analogy (the choir of the title) and a subtle religious subtext (the altar boys). This stark contrast is all the more operatic, in the sense we outlined in the previous two chapters: the tragic condition of human existence is portrayed by characters who sing joyfully about death, evoking the very artificiality of opera that for Auden makes it a perfect vehicle for tragic content.50 The book consists of 17 sections that develop the central theme of the hunt and which systemically deploy those operatic strategies (the mixing of so-called theatricality and the musical elements of Caproni’s poetry) that we have highlighted so far. However, as Rossi underscores, it is in the section entitled Träumerei that the poet creates the perfect symbiosis of poetry and music. The title is a reference to Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood, 1838), 13 songs for piano— “Träumerei” is the seventh and most popular movement, and its title can

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be translated as “daydreaming” or, more commonly, as “vision.” There is no attempt to emulate Schumann’s music—as discussed previously, Caproni was too well aware of the difference between media even to attempt to translate one form into another. Instead, Caproni borrows from the composer the theme of childhood and its innocence, which he sets up as a backdrop for human tragedies, like the Holocaust or terrorism. The most representative of the five poems of this section is the eponymous “Träumerei,” an oneiric and musical portrayal of the horror of Italian politics during the so-called Years of Lead in the 1970s: Hiroshima… Sognala, mentre già t’avvicina la mente all’erba… sempre… più all’erba all’acqua viva… ai sassi dove rimbalza. Sogna. Sogna Piazza Fontana. (On the Beach at Fontana…) Sogna—finché t’è più lontana (l’hai addosso)—la notte dura (sognala!) dell’ossidiana. (“Träumerei,” 19–34)51

Caproni repeats the imperative “Sogna” (“Dream!”) many times in different positions within the poem. He also includes many white spaces, dots, and pauses, which suggest not only silence, but also calm, tranquility, and peace, sentiments inspired by Schumann’s music and its slow tempo. The poem uses fragmentary meters, for the most part variations of the more conventional settenario. According to Russo, Caproni was inspired not only by Schumann’s techniques, but also by his ability to convey existential issues with great ease.52 In Boemia, the last section of the book, opens with yet another musical poem, “Aria del tenore,” which brings the hunt to conclusion. Caproni

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introduces the poem with a (fictional) musical direction: “Andante un poco convulso,” an oxymoron—“Andante” is a moderately slow tempo, while the adjective “convulso” suggests a feverish, jerky movement. This imaginary tempo encapsulates the absurdity of the situation portrayed by the poem and, arguably, by the entire book. Two hunters are hiding, ready to kill their prey. Their presence is suspended in time, immersed as they are in a frozen landscape, peaceful and silent. They spy each other, confused as they are by mixed feelings of hatred and love—they are likened to two brothers, like Cain and Abel. They are also paralyzed by doubt: should they kill each other or fall in love? Exploiting this (absurd) indecision, a third character (the lyrical “I”) surprises and kills them both. They die screaming, while their killer flees. This poem represents the first scene of a very theatrical section. Every poem in this subsection retells the situation of the first poem (or a similar one, Caproni does not specify) from a different point of view. “Il fagiano” (“The pheasant”) and “Giubilo” (“Jubilation”) are narrated from the point of view of two hunters who are killed by another, invisible pursuer, while the last poem “In Boemia” (“In Bohemia”) is told from the perspective of yet another hunter who hears a shot in the distance and abandons his quest, disappointed by his own failure. These poems present all the musical strategies highlighted thus far, but what strikes the reader in this instance is their theatricality. Caproni breaks apart the poetic subject into several characters, focusing on developing the plot of this impossible hunt. The reference to Weber’s opera, like the echo from La traviata, is distorted. While Weber’s opera concludes with the success of the marksman of the title, Caproni’s hunt remains unresolved, with the hunter fleeing. This antecedent also translates “musically”: in Weber’s work the entrance of the hunter is marked by a diminished seventh chord, while in Il franco cacciatore the same chord indicates his exit—if we consider the last poem to be the equivalent of yet another diminished seventh chord, like the poem “Cadenza.”

7.5   The Beast Il conte di Kevenhüller reprises a similar theme (the hunt) as the principal plot device. A collection of poems written between 1979 and 1986, this book is the last episode of the trilogy that began with Il muro della terra. It is arguably Caproni’s most ambitious book, in which musical, storytelling, and theatrical elements converge within an openly operatic paratext. Caproni here declaredly aspires to create a simulation of opera. In the very

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first poem, he defines the entire work as “un’operetta a brani” (“an operetta with tunes”), apologizing to his reader for its shortcomings.53 He divides the book in two parts, respectively entitled Il libretto and La musica. The first section develops the plot of the poem, based on an imaginary hunt for an unspecified beast, while the second abandons this plot and consists of more musical poems—this section is less cohesive thematically, but is still characterized by internal references and a sense of formal continuity. A third section, entitled Altre cadenze, functions like a “coda,” and consists of poems even more heterogeneous and disconnected from Il libretto and La musica.54 The first two sections are, in fact, contained within a precise narrative frame. Caproni introduces the book by incorporating a copy of an eighteenth-century document, the public invitation issued by an unspecified figure called the Count of Kevenhüller, to join in the hunt of a ferocious beast storming northern Lombardy. Caproni notes that the Count is a historical character, but also admits that he chose this title because of its vague operatic echo.55 The theatricality of this book is evident in the first poems of Il libretto, in which all the basic information of this simulated opera is introduced. The first poem, “Fondale della storia” (“Backdrop”) provides the scenery: “L’acciaio/Il ghiacciaio” (“The steel/The glacier”).56 The second, entitled “Luogo dell’azione” (“Place of Action”), describes the location of this hunt: “In ogni dove.”57 The poem “Personaggi” (“Characters”) introduces the main characters, once again diffractions of the poet’s voice: Alcuni Io. Quasi mai io. Altri pronomi. Nomi. Parti secondarie: le stesse del Discorso. (“Personaggi,” 1–6)58

This poem allows us to understand the entire book as the most accomplished example of Caproni’s theatricality and highlights, once again, his conception of the artificiality and deceitfulness of poetry.59 These poems also add a further level of absurdity and underscore yet another contradiction: they are located everywhere and nowhere.60 Most important, the two

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rhyming elements of the setting (“acciaio” and “ghiacciaio”) have no logical connection: Caproni implies that the real dimension of these poems is that of sound. Il conte di Kevenhüller explores even further the musical possibilities of poetry. As in Caproni’s earlier works, the use of musical jargon in these sections orients the reading of these poems, although with one distinction. While in Il franco cacciatore Caproni sought to interweave the music of his poems with a narrative, in Il conte di Kevenhüller the two elements are divorced. The libretto section aims at presenting the reader with the elements of the plot (the hunt for the imaginary Beast): it exemplifies Caproni’s desire for theater and storytelling. But the more the hunt proceeds, the more this aspiration begins to fade and gives room to more musical poems, thematically detached from the central plot. The hunt for the Beast is replaced, at the end of Il libretto, by unrelated poems in which the acoustic dimension prevails over the semantic. The key element of this first section (and of the entire book) is the Beast, the ultimate object of this hunt. As Anna Chella puts it, the Beast is an allegory; a narrative device, both symbolic and metaphoric, open to interpretation.61 The Beast is uncatchable, hidden and mysterious—another incarnation of the “deus absconditus” of Il muro della terra. As Caproni suggests, it could be anything, even the hunter himself, and he never reveals the exact referent for this symbol, which is sometimes an empty one. The poet also suggests that the Beast is an allegory for evil in all its forms, including that within ourselves.62 However, in several poems in this collection, the Beast functions as a symbol for language—in Caproni’s poems often presented as “the Name.” The poem “L’ónoma” (“name” in Greek) explicitly articulates the equivalence between the Beast and the Name: L’ónoma non lascia orma. È pura grammatica. Bestia perciò senza forma. Imprendibilmente erratica. (“L’ónoma,” 1–4)63

Caproni thus offers the opportunity to read the hunt as the allegorical dramatization of his own quest for meaning. Like the Beast, language is fleeting and uncatchable, shapeless and erratic, and the ultimate meaning remains hidden (or perhaps is just dead).

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The musical imagery of the book is reinforced by several references to Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791). For instance, two characters from the opera appear in the first section as alter egos of the poet. As Tristano underscores, the narrator of this section identifies with Papageno, terrified by the scope of his quest.64 But the importance of this opera goes beyond these references. The Zauberflöte participates in the symbolism of the book as well. In order to understand the extent of this participation, we need look at the chronotope in which the hunt takes place. The poem “La frana” (“Landslide”) offers clear details of the timeline in which Caproni located the events of this book: Giorno: il 14 luglio. Anno: quello tra Il Flauto Magico a Vienna e, a Parigi, il Terrore. (“La frana,” 3–5)65

This timeline is bookended by the first performance of Die Zauberflöte (September 30, 1791, in Vienna) and the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution (1793–1794). As Tristano suggests, Mozart’s opera symbolizes the epitome of the Enlightenment, while the Terror represents its opposite: the crumbling of the very ideals incarnated by Mozart.66 This timeline sheds light on many possible interpretations of this poem and, more importantly, on one of the many “harmonic” interpretations of the hunt. In “La frana,” Caproni offers the opportunity to understand the hunt as a chronicle of the progressive collapsing of reason, as the final lines of the poem confirm: “Ai miei occhi, una frana.//La frana d’un’alluvione.//La frana della ragione.”67 The section La musica abandons the narrative elements of Il libretto. Caproni makes even more extensive use of his habitual musical devices: rhymes, repetitions, enjambments, and a limited vocabulary. In this section, the plot disappears and words dissolve in the music created by the harmonic configuration of each poem. As the Beast disappears from the text, Caproni focuses on his poems’ music. At the beginning of the section, he further reinforces the paratext by describing the instruments of the orchestra: La quarta d’un violoncello. Quasi in eco una tuba. Fra gli alberi un flauto d’uccello di fuoco, che un timpano alza in fuga. (“Strumenti dell’orchestra,” 1–4)68

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The line “Uccello di fuoco,” according to some commentators, is a reference to the ballet The Firebird (1910), by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971).69 The reference to this imaginary animal could also be read as part of Caproni’s zoological imagery, adding to the allegorical presence of animals throughout the book. In La musica, however, the symbol of the Beast is replaced by that of the Door. In the poem “La porta” (“The Door”), Caproni reveals that the Door is but another symbol for language (previously the Name, here the Word): “La porta/morgana://la Parola.”70 The poem consists of a series of stanzas of mixed length and meter. Caproni uses the anaphora “La porta” to give rhythm to this elusive entity. At each repetition, he adds a further dimension to the complexity and inscrutability of this symbol. Just as Caproni’s door denotes a liminal dimension, between transparency and obscurity, so too does language stand between existence and nothingness: an emptiness that does not deliver any meaning. These ideas are reprised in the last subsection of La musica with another reference to Mozart. Abendempfindung (“Evening feelings”) is the title of a famous lied (K523, 1787) by the Austrian composer, with lyrics by poet Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818). Mozart’s lied captures the evening reflections of a narrator, who contemplates life and human existence. Caproni takes up the general idea of twilight reflections with a series of lyrical poems set between sunset and night. However, he uses the opportunity to reiterate a central concern of his poetry: his distrust for language. In “Di un luogo preciso, descritto per enumerazione” (“Of a Precise Place, Described by Enumeration”), the poet describes impressionistically a countryside scene at dusk. Despite the title, the location portrayed is far from precise.71 In fact, this place is described through a listing of objects, landscape details, and narrative situations that do not make the place any more real. This is because, more than the description of a space, Caproni gives what is essentially a description of time, which emerges more from the rhythm of the poem than from the text itself. Objects fade between dusk and evening, and it is the silence that reveals the real essence of this place. In the last stanza of the poem, this place is declared safe from the Beast that hides behind words; it is safe from language and the necessity to name things.72 In the eponymous poem of this subsection (“Abendempfindung”), Caproni reenacts his distrust of literal descriptions, claiming explicitly that “Non c’è sembianza—è detto—/che affermi la sostanza.” (1–2).73 A long series of details is not enough to capture reality. Aware of this, Caproni

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again communicates his distrust of language by using a reiteration of the symbol of the Door: “Richiudo/—con cautela—il portone” (8–9).74 Here, Caproni figuratively closes his poetry to language. Abendempfindung is also the final subsection of La musica. In the last poem (“Smorzando”), titled after another musical direction, Caproni prepares for his opera to conclude, while the sound of his poetry slowly fades away: S’udivano ormai lontane e quasi senza rumore… Fucilate d’amore nel brivido del fogliame mosso dal soffio delle ore… (“Smorzando,” 1–5)75

Caproni reprises the theme of the hunt—evoking the final scenes of Il franco cacciatore—but here emphasizes the acoustic dimension. The poem portrays the sound of gunshots, fading in the distance. The hunt is concluded and so is the narrative device that framed Il conte di Kevenhüller: the poems of the following section, entitled Altre cadenze, will abandon any organizational principle, as well as any thematic connection with the previous two. Throughout his career, Caproni progressively tested the expressive limits of poetry. He voiced his distrust for language and his desire to go beyond the semantic constraint of words, and toward a musical expression of pure thought. His attempt can be understood best at the intersection of Montale and Saba. Both were unable (or unwilling) to find resolution and so was Caproni: his quest remains unresolved and his questions unanswered. Each book of the trilogy that we analyzed ends on a similar sentiment of suspension, like a diminished seventh chord. With Il conte di Kevenhüller, his most accomplished simulation of opera, Caproni found a format in which to channel his desire to push poetry beyond its limits, through a hybrid mixture of theater, music, and narrative elements, that sought to capture the complexity of his own experience (and portrayal) of human existence, his theological search for meaning, as well as the inadequacy of language. At the end of the book, however, the Beast is vanquished, and the hunt for meaning unending.

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Notes 1. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo divides (with some arbitrariness) Caproni’s career into three seasons (L’opera in versi, XII-XIII). The first period includes the first four books: Come un’allegoria (1936), Ballo a Fontanigorda (1938), Finzioni (1941), and Cronistoria (1943). The second season begins with Stanze della funicolare (1952) and ends with L’ultimo borgo (1980). This chapter focuses on the third season, with the exclusion of Res amissa, published posthumously in 1991. 2. “[Sono arrivato alla poesia] studiando appunto la musica. Per comporre dei corali a quattro voci dove ero arrivato io . . . il mio maestro voleva che musicassi delle parole. Prendevo dei poeti antichi: Poliziano, Rinuccini, il Tasso lirico. Poi alla fine mi stancai di fare queste ricerche. Cominciai a scriverli da solo. Vidi che il maestro non se ne accorgeva e non mi chiedeva di chi erano. Ecco come presi il vizio di scrivere la poesia, poi la musica è caduta ed è rimasto il paroliere.” ([I discovered poetry] while studying music. In order to compose chorales for four voices. . . my teacher wanted me to find words that I could set to music. I drew from ancient poets: Poliziano, Rinuccini, the lyrical Tasso. Eventually I got tired of this research and I began to write my own words. The teacher did not notice anything and did not ask who had written these words. That’s how I got into the habit of writing poetry, then the music fell away and the lyricist remained). Caproni, Vita da poeta (Le voci della scrittura), RAITRE, December 17, 1987, TV. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 3. Ferdinando Camon, “Giorgio Caproni,” Il mestiere di poeta (Milan: Lerici editori, 1965), 127. 4. Giovanni Raboni, “Introduction to Giorgio Caproni,” in L’ultimo borgo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), 5–13. 5. Stefano Vecchi, “Il musicista delle parole,” L’illustrazione italiana: Nuova serie 6, no. 35 (1986): 106. 6. A general study of the relationship between Caproni and music is the collection of proceedings edited by Maria Luisa Eguez, Giorgio Caproni e la musica: Atti del convegno della V edizione del Premio letterario LERICI GOLFO DEI POETI (La Spezia: Edizioni Cinque Terre, 1991). Other studies include Ulderico Pietrantonio, “La mia vita è una settima diminuita: Musica e strutture armoniche nella poesia di Giorgio Caproni,” in Lingue e letterature in contatto: Atti del XV Congresso dell’A.I.P.I. Brunico, 24–27 agosto 2002, ed. Bart Van den Bossche, Michel Bastiaensen, and Corinna Salvadori Lonergan (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2004), 245–259; Rodolfo Zucco, “Caproni e la tradizione melica,” Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana 26 (2005): 101–114; Ulderico Pietrantonio, “‘Pensiero puro senza parole’: La musica nei versi di Giorgio Caproni,”

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Otto-Novecento 31, no. 3 (2007): 127–139. For a less specialized analysis of the presence of music in Caproni’s poetry, see also Giuseppe Leonelli, Giorgio Caproni: Storia d’una poesia tra musica e retorica (Milan: Garzanti, 1997). 7. Giancarlo Russo, “Caproni fra letteratura e musica: Un’interpretazione di Träumerei,” Sinestesie 4, no. 1–2 (2006): 206. See also Giuseppe Leonelli, Giorgio Caproni (Milan: Garzanti, 1997), 16. 8. “Caproni aveva una conoscenza approfondita della materia musicale, e che quando scriveva poesie per certi aspetti cercava anche di creare musica” (Caproni had a profound knowledge of the field of music, and when he wrote poetry in some respects he also tried to create music). Russo, “Caproni fra letteratura e musica,” 236. 9. “Con molti suoni e molti/balli, quest’oggi il Santo/celebra la sua sagra/ nel fervore dei vivi” (With many sounds and many/dances, today the Saint/celebrates his festival/in the fervor of the living). Caproni, L’opera in versi, 40. 10. Pierluigi Rosso, “La musica nella poesia,” in Giorgio Caproni e la musica, 64. 11. Caproni writes: “Non so fino a che punto sarebbe giusto dire che ‘tanta mia poesia è musica, e per di più per violino.’ Un’arte non può mai essere un’altra, a meno che non si voglia restare nel campo delle approssimazioni e dei vezzeggiativi” (I do not know to what extent it would be fair to claim that “so much of my poetry is music for violin.” An art can never be another, unless you are content with approximations and endearments). Camon, “Giorgio Caproni,” 128. 12. Pietrantonio, “Pensiero puro senza parole,” 139. The critic bases his idea on Caproni’s words: “È soprattutto in virtù della musica della parola [che un poeta] riesce a suscitare nel lettore—più che a comunicare per via diretta—le proprie emozioni: le proprie idee” (It is above all by virtue of the music of the word [that a poet] manages to stimulate in the reader— rather than to communicate directly—his own emotions: his own ideas). Caproni, La scatola nera, 36. 13. As Caproni explains in his radio conversations edited by Luigi Surdich: “[La] mia sfiducia nella parola . . . io la sentivo già a quei tempi, questa insufficienza della parola: il mio ideale era quello di scrivere sul pentagramma, insomma, andare oltre la parola” (My distrust in the word . . . I already felt it earlier on, this insufficiency of the word: my ideal was to write on the pentagram, in short, to go beyond the word). Caproni, “Era così bello parlare”: Conversazioni radiofoniche con Giorgio Caproni, ed. Luigi Surdich (Genoa: Il melangolo, 2004), 164. In a later session Caproni confirmed: “L’ideale sarebbe arrivare oltre la parola: abbiamo già accennato alla mia sfiducia nel potere creative della parola” (The ideal would be to go

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beyond words: we already mentioned my distrust toward the creative possibilities of words). Caproni, Era così bello parlare, 221. 14. In regard to the freedom of language from the limitations of representing reality, Caproni wrote: “Tale libertà deve crescere, e in ragione inversa alla rigidità dei plessi sintattici e logici prefabbricati, a mano a mano che dall’informazione si passa alla cronaca . . . dalla cronaca alla storia e al saggio, e poi da questi generi a quelli della poesia . . . fino a raggiungere la sua assolutezza nel canto” (This freedom must grow, and in inverse proportion to the complexity of the prefabricated logical nexuses, we go from a piece of information to the news . . . from the news to a story or an essay, and then from these literary genres to poetry. . . until we reach absolute freedom in singing). Caproni, La scatola nera, 16. 15. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 460: “Words. Right./They dissolve the object.// Like fog the trees,/the river: the ferry.” 16. Caproni, La scatola nera, 18. 17. Caproni, La scatola nera, 29: “Actually in poetry (as in music or in painting or any other artistic expression) it is important not so much to understand but to feel, and therefore, once experienced through emotion, to really understand with a depth (or intensity) infinitely superior to that in which the most logical of logical discourses could have plunged (or raised) us.” 18. “La dimensione musicale delle poesie di Caproni consente, tanto all’autore quanto all’ascoltatore, di porsi in condizione di ascolto, dimensione che appare sensibilmente legata a un’ermeneutica; ascoltare significa, dunque, mettersi in condizione di decodificare ciò che è oscuro, confuso o muto, per far apparire alla coscienza il di sotto del senso” (The musical dimension of Caproni’s poems allows both the author and the listener to place themselves in a listening position, a dimension that seems to be strongly linked to hermeneutics; to listen means, therefore, to be in a position to decode what is obscure, confused or dumb, to make the meaning that’s underneath emerge to the consciousness). Pietrantonio, “Pensiero puro senza parole,” 138. 19. Caproni, La scatola nera, 34: “While in practical (everyday) language the acoustic or graphic signal of the word remains strictly literal, in order to convey pure and simple information, in poetic language the word itself preserves its literal meaning, but is also loaded with an almost infinite series of ‘harmonic’ meanings (and I mean harmonic as it is used in physics and music) that forms its peculiar expressive force.” 20. In another iteration of his ideas on the harmonics series of poems, Caproni writes: “In poesia, una parola viene ad assumere, oltre il suo significato lessicale, un imprevedibile numero di significati che vorrei paragonare agli ‘armonici’ di una nota musicale, e tutti scaturenti non soltanto dal valore della parola in sé bensì insieme dal luogo ch’essa ha nella tessitura armonica

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di un poema” (In poetry, a word comes to assume, beyond its lexical meaning, an unpredictable number of meanings that I would like to compare to the “harmonics” of a musical note. They arise not only from the value of the word itself but from the place it occupies in the harmonic texture of a poem). Caproni, Il lavoro nuovo, August 24, 1949, 3. Also in Pietrantonio, “Pensiero puro senza parole,” 128. Italics mine. 21. Caproni’s analogy with the technique of the harmonic series extends to his use of rhyme, as he explained in his interview with Camon: “Si potrebbe vedere ad esempio nell’uso che io faccio del ritmo o della rima, da me intesa come consonanza o dissonanza di vocaboli (di idee) che fondendosi insieme (o richiamandosi) generano una ‘terza’ idea poetica che è quella che conta nella composizione” (You could see, for instance, the use I make of rhythm or rhyme, which I understand as consonance or dissonance of words (of ideas) that by blending together (or by recalling each other) generate a “third” poetic idea that is what actually matters in the poem). Camon, “Giorgio Caproni,”128. 22. As Caproni explains: “È naturale, io concepisco un libro, forse presuntuosamente, un po’ come si può concepire una sonata, una sinfonia, cioè in vari tempi: l’Allegro, l’Adagio, magari il Grave, il molto Grave, l’Allegretto, magari anche lo Scherzo, anche Freddura, non ho paura. Tanto i temi sono più aulici, più diciamo, sublimi, più mi piace questa alternanza” (It is natural, I conceive a book, perhaps presumptuously, like one could conceive a sonata, a symphony, using different tempos: Allegro, Adagio, perhaps Grave, molto Grave, Allegretto, maybe also Scherzo, even Freddura: I’m not afraid. The nobler the themes, the more (let’s say) sublime, the more I like this alternation). Caproni, Era così bello parlare, 220. 23. “Questo muro della terra evidentemente in Dante non è altro che il muro di cinta della città di Dite; per me, viceversa, significa il limite che incontra, ad un certo momento, la ragione umana e allora, leggiamo, ecco  . . . e questo è il tema di cui poi tutti i vari componenti sono le variazioni” (This wall of the earth evidently in Dante is nothing but the wall that surrounds the city of Dis; for me, however, it symbolizes the limit that human reason reaches, at a certain moment . . . all the other poems are but variations of this central theme). Caproni, Era così bello parlare, 221. 24. “Un semplice dato:/Dio non s’è nascosto./Dio s’è suicidato” (A simple fact:/God is not hiding./God committed suicide). Caproni, L’opera in versi, 331. 25. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 281: “‘Border,’ said the sign./I looked for the customs. It was not there./I did not see, behind the gate,/any sign of foreign land.”

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26. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 282: “They all left and farewell./Farewell and farewell and to God./Only those who did not leave (me)/did leave in that messy reshuffling.” 27. See Pietrantonio, “Pensiero puro senza parole,” 136. “‘Piaccia o non piaccia!’/disse. ‘Ma se Dio fa tanto,’/disse, ‘di non esistere, io,/quant’è vero Iddio, a Dio/io gli spacco la faccia’” (“Like it or not!”/He said. “But if God dares,”/he said, “not to exist, I/God willing, I/will break God’s face”). Caproni, L’opera in versi, 326. 28. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 306: “(piano)/(Somebody must have screamed,/ somewhere in the woods. For those who listened.)//(fortissimo)/But— everyone!—sang/victory, before their death rattle). 29. Caproni wanted his poetry to be read aloud, possibly by an actor or an interpreter, as he mentioned in an interview: “Il congedo del viaggiatore è per voce recitante . . . io credo molto alla poesia detta . . . se l’interprete è bravo, anzi io lo ritengo necessario” (Il congedo del viaggiatore is for the reciting voice. . . I believe very much in a poem read aloud. . . if the interpreter is good, I think it becomes a necessity). Caproni, Era così bello parlare, 67. 30. Directions and dynamics define the musical expression of a score; they offer instructions to the musician in regard to his/her performance. Directions offer information about the tempo of a given music piece, while dynamics indicate the variation in volume between phrases or notes. 31. In music theory, cadenza is a melodic formula that concludes a musical composition. This poem, however, portrays a sense of irresolution, through the analogy of the diminished seventh chord. 32. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 187: “Tonic, third, fifth,/diminished seventh./ It remains so unresolved/the chord of my life?” 33. Caproni loved in particular Mascagni and Verdi. About the latter he said, during an interview: “Di fronte a Verdi mi tolgo tutti quei cappelli che non porto” (Before Verdi I bow many times over). Caproni, Era così bello parlare, 72. 34. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 335: “Give me your hand. Come./Guide your guide. I tremble./Do not tremble. Together,/soon we’ll Return/to our nothingness—into nothingness/(together) we’ll Die again.” 35. “We will leave Paris, O beloved,/We’ll spend our life together…/You’ll be rewarded for your past sufferings,/Your health will bloom again…/You’ll be my light, my breath,/All the future will smile on us.” Trans. W. Weaver, 235. 36. Lonardi, Il fiore dell’addio, 45–51. 37. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 33: “Your breast is filled/with milk.” 38. “Oh Lola! Your shirt is white like milk/White and red like a cherry!”

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39. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 164: “In the black air that glitters/as shiny as an iris.” See Stefano Verdino, “Le ‘Odicine genovesi,’” Nell’opera di Caproni, Istmi 5–6 (1999): 159. Also Lonardi, Il fiore dell’addio, 47. 40. “Oh, lovely night! So many stars!/I have never seen them so beautiful!/ Every spark glitters and shines/like the glare of an eye.” 41. Lonardi, Il fiore dell’addio, 47. 42. Francesca Bernard, “Il ‘desiderio di teatro’ nell’ultimo Caproni,” Poetiche 1 (2010): 60. 43. In an interview, Caproni elucidates the sense of theatricality of his later books: “Più che di teatralità tout court, io parlerei di simulazione teatrale e questa in me è fortissima, questo desiderio di teatro, che però non trovo naturalmente raggiunto da me . . . [a causa] della mancanza del dialogo” (More than theatricality tout court, I would rather speak of theatrical simulation and this desire for theater is very strong in me, but I do not think I was able to accomplish it. . . [due] to the lack of dialogue). Caproni, Era così bello parlare, 254. 44. Calvino writes: “Bisognerà anche dire della narratività di Caproni, che potrebbe essere anche detta teatralità, perché di solito al centro delle sue poesie-racconto c’è un personaggio che parla, e più che raccontare agisce parlando” (It will also be necessary to mention Caproni’s narrative effort, which could be called theatricality, because usually at the center of his narrative poems there is a character that speaks, and more than telling, he describes his actions). Italo Calvino, “Il taciturno ciarliero,” in Genova a Giorgio Caproni, ed. Giovanni Devoto and Stefano Verdino (Genoa: Edizioni di San Marco dei Giustiniani, 1982), 248. Calvino’s article first appeared as “Nel cielo dei pipistrelli,” La Repubblica, December 19, 1980, 17. The essay is also included in Giorgio Caproni, Tutte le poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1983), 1023–1027. 45. Mengaldo in Caproni, L’opera in versi, XXVIII-XXIX. 46. Regarding his interest in the theme of the hunt and the image of the hunter, Caproni claimed: “Quella che soprattutto m’interessa è la figura del cacciatore . . . vista—come già la figura del viaggiatore—in veste di cercatore . . . Cercatore di che? Di dio? Della verità? Di ciò che sta dietro il fenomeno ed oltre l’ultimo confine cui può giungere la ragione? Della propria o dell’altrui identità? . . . Una domanda vale l’altra, e forse si tratta solo di ricerca per amor di ricerca” (What interests me most of all is the character of the hunter. . . portrayed—as the character of the traveler before—as a seeker. . . Seeker of what? Of God? Of the truth? Of what is hidden behind the phenomenon and beyond the last boundary that reason can reach? Of one’s own identity or somebody else’s? . . . One question is worth the other and, perhaps, it is just research for the sake of research itself). Caproni, L’opera in versi, 1574.

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47. Rosso, “La musica nella poesia,” 73. 48. Pietro Citati compared Il franco cacciatore to an opera libretto with its own music: “È possibile leggere questa raccolta come un libretto d’opera che nasconde la propria musica” (One can read this book as an opera libretto that conceals its own music). Citati, in L’ultimo borgo, 26. About the structure of this book, Caproni confirmed: “Ho cercato di dargli questa struttura, diciamo così operistica . . . questa simulazione ecco di opera” (I tried to give it this structure, let’s say operatic. . . this simulation of an opera). Caproni, L’opera in versi, 1573. 49. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 416: “Come on, let’s sing, let’s sing./Let’s sing with a joyful voice./The temporary birth./The permanent death.” 50. See Chap. 6. 51. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 488: “Hiroshima…//Dream about it,/as it brings your mind/closer to the grass…/to the water/alive…/to stones/ where it bounces.//Dream.//Dream of Piazza Fontana.//(On the Beach at Fontana)//Dream—as long as it’s farthest from you/(it’s all over you)—the darkest night/(dream about it!) the obsidian night.” 52. Russo, “Caproni fra letteratura e musica,” 243. 53. “Quest’Operetta a brani,/Lettor, non ti sia sgradita./Accettala così com’è,/finita ed infinita” (May this operetta with tunes/be to your liking, Reader./Accept it the way it is,/both finished and unfinished). Caproni, L’opera in versi, 535. 54. Caproni explained that he considered this section just a book within the book (Il conte di Kevenhüller). He justified the heterogeneous nature of this section using a musical analogy, explaining that he was inspired by the musical principle of the “variazione continua,” a composition based on the ongoing variation of any formal aspects (harmony, melody, rhythm, etc.) of a given musical theme. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 1628. 55. Regarding the choice of the title, Caproni states: “Perché mi sa di operetta . . . ma un’operetta ‘tragica’; un Singspiel con arie di morte…” (It reminded me of an operetta . . . but a “tragic” operetta; a Singspiel with deadly arias). Caproni, in Caproni e la musica, 86. 56. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 545. 57. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 546: “Everywhere.” 58. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 547: “Some I./Never me./Other pronouns./ Names.//Secondary parts:”/the same as Speech.” 59. Caproni, L’opera in versi, XVIII. 60. In her article, Bernard concludes that the kind of theater Caproni had in mind was the Theater of the Absurd, analyzing the influence of Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) and the work/writings of Italian philosopher Giuseppe Rensi (1871–1944). Bernard, 68–75.

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61. Anna Chella, “Prove di melodramma in poesia: Il conte di Kevenhüller di Giorgio Caproni,” Soglie 13, no. 1 (2011): 25. 62. Caproni, Era così bello parlare, 266–267. In one instance, Caproni claimed: “Non è Dio, o soltanto Dio, secondo la fissazione di troppi critici . . . La Bestia siamo anche noi stessi . . . Può essere presa a simbolo (o metafora) del Male che l’uomo stesso, quasi per vocazione al suicidio, si fabbrica con le proprie mani” (It is not God, or not only God, according to the interpretation of too many critics. . . We are the Beast ourselves . . . It can be taken as a symbol [or metaphor] of Evil that man himself, almost by vocation to suicide, makes with his own hands). Caproni, L’opera in versi, 1628. 63. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 569: “The ónoma leaves no traces./It is pure grammar./Therefore it is a shapeless Beast./Uncatchably erratic.” 64. Tristano, “Caproni e la musica,” 86. 65. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 554: “Day: July 14th./Year: the year between The Magic Flute/in Vienna and, in Paris, the Terror.” 66. Tristano, “Caproni e la musica,” 84. 67. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 554: “In my eyes, a landslide.//The landslide after a flood.//The landslide of reason.” 68. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 593. 69. Rosso, “La musica nella poesia,” 92. 70. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 610: “The door/morgana://the Word.” 71. In the essay “Il quadrato della verità,” Caproni expressed his distrust of narrative descriptions: “Quella ch’è comunemente ritenuta la forma più aderente di scrittura: quella descrittiva . . . [è] invece la più impossibile delle forme letterarie possibili” (The descriptive style is commonly considered the most adherent form of writing . . . it is instead the most impossible among the possible literary forms). Caproni, La scatola nera, 18. 72. “Il luogo/è salvo dal fruscio/della bestia in fuga, che sempre/—è detto – è nella parola” (The place/is safe from the rustle/of the runaway beast, which always/—it’s been said before—is inside the word). Caproni, L’opera in versi, 626. 73. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 633: “There is no appearance—it is said—/that affirms the substance.” 74. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 633: “I close/—with caution—the door.” 75. Caproni, L’opera in versi, 634: “They were now far away/and almost noiseless…//Gunshots of love/in the shivering foliage/blown by the passing time…”

7  POETRY AND THE BEAST: GIORGIO CAPRONI’S SIMULATIONS OF OPERA 

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References Primary Sources Caproni, Giorgio. 1980. L’ultimo borgo. Poesie (1932–1978), ed. Giovanni Raboni. Milan: Rizzoli. ———. 1996. La scatola nera. Milan: Garzanti. ———. 1998. L’opera in versi, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2004. «Era così bello parlare». Conversazioni radiofoniche con Giorgio Caproni, ed. Luigi Surdich. Genoa: Il melangolo.

Secondary Sources Bernard, Francesca. 2010. Il «desiderio di teatro» nell’ultimo Caproni. Poetiche 1: 59–75. Calvino, Italo. 1982. Il taciturno ciarliero. In Genova a Giorgio Caproni, ed. Giorgio Devoto and Stefano Verdino, 247–250. Genoa: Edizioni S. Marco dei Giustiniani. Camon, Ferdinando. 1965. Giorgio Caproni. In Il mestiere di poeta, 125–136. Milan: Lerici editori. Chella, Anna. 2011. Prove di melodramma in poesia. Il conte di Kevenhüller di Giorgio Caproni. Soglie XIII (1): 22–41. Eguez, Maria Luisa, ed. 1991. Giorgio Caproni e la musica. Atti del convegno della V edizione del Premio letterario LERICI GOLFO DEI POETI. La Spezia: Edizioni Cinque Terre. Leonelli, Giuseppe. 1997. Giorgio Caproni: Storia di una poesia tra musica e retorica. Milan: Garzanti. Lonardi, Gilberto. 2003. Il fiore dell’addio: Leonora, Manrico e altri fantasmi del melodramma nella poesia di Montale. Bologna: Il Mulino. Pietrantonio, Ulderico. 2004. «La mia vita è una settima diminuita». Musica e strutture armoniche nella poesia di Giorgio Caproni. In Lingue e letterature in contatto. Atti del XV Congresso dell’A.I.P.I.  Brunico, 24–27 agosto 2002, ed. Bart Van den Bossche, Michel Bastiaensen, and Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, 245–259. Florence: Franco Cesati Editore. ———. 2007. «Pensiero puro senza parole». La musica nei versi di Giorgio Caproni. Otto-novecento 3 (31): 127–139. Russo, Giancarlo. 2006. Caproni fra letteratura e musica: Un’interpretazione di Traümerei. Sinestesie IV (I-II): 235–245. Tristano, Alberto Alfredo. 2003. Caproni e la musica. Suggestioni mozartiane ne Il conte di Kevenhüller. Riscontri I. 1: 83–90.

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Vecchi, Stefano. 1986. Il musicista delle parole. L’illustrazione italiana: Nuova serie 6 (35): 106. Verdino, Stefano. 1999. Le ‘Odicine genovesi. Nell’opera di Caproni, Istmi 5-6: 153–162. Weaver, William. 1963. Verdi Librettos. Garden City: Doubleday. Zucco, Rodolfo. 2005. Caproni e la tradizione melica. Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana 26: 101–114.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusions

When Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo first noted the presence of operatic references in Eugenio Montale’s poetry, he called his discovery an epiphany, but nonetheless went on to dismiss these references as incidental. This reaction sums up the myopic attitude that has marred academic acknowledgement of opera’s presence in modern Italian poetry, identifying operatic allusions but stopping short of looking deeper. In this book, I have challenged this attitude, accounting for the cultural significance of opera, foregrounding the thematic weight that operatic references carry, and looking for commonalities in the ways major Italian poets used opera as an expressive tool in their works. The authors I have examined are not mere case studies of the presence of opera thematics in modern Italian poetry, but are towering figures in their own right, with interconnections between them that are brought out by investigating their debts to opera. In turn, these interconnections, as I hope to have shown, bring out the complexity of opera’s artistic and intellectual role in the twentieth century. Though these poets held very different conceptions of poetry, they shared music—and especially opera—as a common language. As I showed in the Introduction, these poets were part of a larger community of literary authors—in Italy and abroad—who were inspired by opera. But these four—D’Annunzio, Saba, Montale, and Caproni—stand out for the systematic nature of their engagement with opera, and the extent to which this engagement evolved over the course of their lives. They all dreamed at some stage of becoming musicians, and thus the musicality of their © The Author(s) 2020 M. Acetoso, Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46091-4_8

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poetry shares an element of personal, unfulfilled ambition. But their engagement with opera also responded to a shared artistic need, a sense of crisis towards poetic expression and a desire for innovation that was circulating among twentieth-century poets.For D’Annunzio, this meant first imitating and then surpassing the “total work of art” idealized by Wagner. For Montale and Saba, opera would be part of an effort to surpass D’Annunzio himself—for Montale, by challenging the magniloquence of D’Annunzio (and others) with the humble vocabulary of operatic verismo, and for Saba, by replacing D’Annunzio’s idol-worship of Wagner with a nuanced admiration for Verdi. For Caproni, simulating opera was a means to express a pervasive distrust toward language. Beyond the use of opera as a means of innovation, we also saw the versatility of opera as a poetic tool, one that allowed Saba to express his conflicted political and sexual identity and that gave Montale the means to work through his very serious disillusionment with the poetic craft. The presence of opera in modern Italian poetry still needs to be comprehensively explored and elucidated. In this book, I have tried to lay the groundwork for this by applying a melopoetic approach. I chose opera as a filter to better understand twentieth-century Italian poetry and looked to the deeper connection between the two arts. My inquiry into the work of these four poets by no means exhausts the rich operatic presence in modern Italian poetry, but I hope it has shown how deeply opera can be woven into the fabric of twentieth-century poetics, thus setting the stage for further scholarly inquiry.

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Index1

A Abruzzo, 40–42, 49, 53 Agamemnon, 49 Albano, see Teatro di Festa Alboni, Marietta, 6 Alfano, Franco, 1, 65n80 Alighieri, Dante, 83, 97n61, 139n92, 185, 186, 197, 202n15, 207n52, 221 Anti-Semitism, 79 Apollonian, 44, 45, 48, 79, 194 Armonici, see Harmonic series Ashbrook, William, 2, 4 Astor Opera Theater, 6 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 193, 194, 209n56, 227 The Dyer’s Hand, 7 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 16, 71, 78

B Bach, Johann Sebastian, 162, 163, 177n84 Fugues, 73, 163 Violin Sonatas, 163 Bakar mockery, 53, 66n87 Balilla Pratella, Francesco, 3 Balzac, Honoré de, 194 Barilli, Bruno, 2, 3 Baudelaire, Charles, 38, 42, 55n4 Bayreuth, 16, 33–55, 192, 202n19, 202n20 Beast, 18, 215–234 Belli, Giuseppe Gioachino, 84 Bellini, Vincenzo, 39 La sonnambula, 103, 128n1 Norma, 6, 21n26 Bergson, Henri, 116

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Acetoso, Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46091-4

265

266 

INDEX

Berio, Luciano, 9, 23n44, 27n79 Passaggio, 10 Berlin, 186 Bernhardt, Sarah, 49 Bizet, Georges, 62n55, 75, 77, 78, 80, 85, 89n16, 90n20, 95n49, 147, 180n103 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 51 Orlando innamorato, 51 Boine, Giovanni, 111 Boito, Arrigo, 58–59n31, 112 Mefistofele, 112 Bologna, 37, 41 Bossi, Renzo, 11 Boutroux, Emile, 116 Brandeis, Irma, see Clizia Britten, Benjamin, 7 Brooks, Peter, 168n10, 194, 209–210n63 Brown, Calvin Smith, 15, 28n85, 29n86, 125, 141n98, 163, 167n1 Music and Literature, 15, 125 Bruegel, Peter, 184, 185 Triumph of Death, 185, 200n8 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 83, 97n61, 149 Busenello, Francesco, 8 Buti, Carlo, 158 Byron, George Gordon, 51 C Cabiria, 53 Calvino, Italo, 9, 23n42, 23–24n44, 24n45, 226, 240n44 La panchina, 9 La vera storia, 9 Under the Jaguar Sun, 9 “Un re in ascolto,” 9 Camerata de’ Bardi, 2, 10, 16, 18n3, 20n15, 62n55, 208n55 Cammarano, Salvadore, 76, 90n25, 109, 193, 207n50, 212n79

Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 233 Canzonetta, 147, 157–167, 176n76, 218 Caproni, Giorgio, 5, 18, 215–234, 245, 246 “Abendempfindung,” 233, 234 “A una giovane sposa,” 225 Ballo a Fontanigorda, 217, 235n1 “Cadenza,” 223, 229, 239n31 “Coretto,” 227 “Deus absconditus,” 221, 231 “Di un luogo preciso,” 233 “Falsa indicazione,” 221, 222 Finzioni, 218, 235n1 “Fondale della storia,” 230 “Giubilo,” 229 Il conte di Kevenhüller, 18, 215, 216, 221, 229, 231, 234, 241n54 “Il fagiano,” 229 Il franco cacciatore, 18, 215, 218, 221, 226, 227, 229, 231, 234, 241n48 “In Boemia,” 228, 229 “In eco,” 223 “La frana,” 232 “La porta,” 233 “Le parole,” 218 “L’ónoma,” 231 “Lo stravolto,” 222 “Luogo dell’azione,” 230 Muro della terra, 18, 215, 217, 221, 222, 224, 227, 229, 231 “Personaggi,” 230 “Poesia chiara e poesia oscura,” 219 “A Rosario,” 225 “Quasi ad aulica dedica,” 221 “Sagra,” 217 “Sogna,” 228 “Su un’eco stravolta,” 224 “Tre vocalizzi prima di cominciare,” 221 “Tristissima copia,” 222

 INDEX 

Capuana, Luigi, 113 Carducci, Giosuè, 4, 38, 71, 96n54, 128 Carmen (character), 75–79, 85, 89n16, 89n17, 90n20, 90n24, 91n32, 92n36, 147, 167, 180n103 Carmen (opera), 62n55, 75, 77, 78, 89n15, 95n49, 180n103 Casa Ricordi, 51 Casella, Alfredo, 52 Castel Sant’Angelo, 13, 109, 189 Castro, Juan José, 9, 23n39, 129n5 Catholicism, 56n8, 72 Cattaneo, Carlo, 80 Cavaradossi, 13, 14, 109, 189, 190, 196–199, 204n30 Cenacolo di Francavilla, 40 Cervantes, Miguel de, 9, 23n39, 128n5 Chopin, Fréderic, 42, 59n35 Christianity, 45, 60n44 Cicognini, Giacinto Andrea, 8 Cinema, 4, 21n21, 23n38, 53, 194 Clizia, 114, 134n48, 183, 191, 202n15, 202n17 Conti, Angelo, 49 Corazzini, Sergio, 4, 21n17 Corporazione delle nuove musiche, 52 Corriere dell’informazione, 104 Crepuscolari, 4, 6, 21n17 Crepuscular poets, see Crepuscolari Crystal bell, 119, 120 D Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 8, 152 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 83, 97n61 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 27n78, 33–55, 71, 73, 82–84, 86, 92n35, 96n54, 97n59, 97n61, 97n63, 107, 108, 110, 111, 116, 118,

267

122, 127, 128, 129n6, 154, 156, 162, 202n15, 216, 245, 246 Alcyone, 36, 39, 108 “Ancora sopra l’‘Erotik,’”, 38 “Consolazione,” 39 “Discorso della siepe,” 50 Elettra, 39 Fedra, 49, 53, 65–66n86 Fiaccola sotto il Moggio, La, 49 Figlia di Iorio, La, 49, 52 Forse che si, forse che no, 49 Francesca da Rimini, 49, 51 Gioconda, La, 49 “Il capobanda,” 51 Il fuoco, 16, 34, 39, 40, 47–50, 63n59, 63n61 Il piacere, 35, 39, 40 Il trionfo della morte, 39, 40, 42–44, 46, 59n38, 153, 154 La città morta, 49, 63n61 La nave, 53, 97n59 “La pioggia nel pineto,” 39, 108, 122, 127, 130n15 “La reggenza del Carnaro,” 66n88 “La rinascenza della tragedia,” 46, 49 Le vergini delle rocce, 44 Libro segreto, 37, 39 L’innocente, 40, 57n17 Notturno, 49 Persephone, 47 Più che l’amore, 49 Poema paradisiaco, 35, 36, 38, 39, 57n11, 71, 96n53 “A proposito della Giuditta,” 33, 34, 50, 58n27 “Romanza della donna velata,” 39 “Sopra un ‘Adagio’ (di Johannes Brahms),” 38 “Sopra un’aria antica,” 39 “Sopra un ‘Erotik’ (di Edvard Grieg),” 38 “Trilogia del giglio,” 44 “Un poeta melico,” 41

268 

INDEX

Daily Eagle, 6 Dantean, see Alighieri, Dante De Falla, Manuel, 9, 23n39, 129n5 Atlantida, 9, 23n39, 129n5 De la Barca, Calderon, 198 De Laurentiis, Dino, 4, 21n19 De Molina, Tirso, 152 El burlador de Sevilla, 152 Death, 1–3, 6, 8, 12, 13, 22n35, 33–55, 75, 97n63, 112, 114, 147, 153, 154, 157, 159, 166, 167, 168n6, 169n12–14, 170n36, 172n47, 180n103, 183–199, 221, 223–225, 227, 239n28 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 73, 74, 77, 88n14, 146, 147, 161, 165, 166, 167n1, 180n98 Debussy, Claude, 8, 36, 122–124, 138n81, 138n87 Le Martyr de Saint Sébastien, 8 Préludes, 122 Decadence, 45, 60n44 Decadentism, 78 Del Carlo, Omar, 9, 23n39, 129n5 Proserpina y el Extranjero, 9 DeMille, Cecil Blount, 4 Desacralization, 194 Dionysian, 44, 48, 78 Discord, 56n7, 118, 126, 127, 164 Don Giovanni, 147, 151–157, 166, 167, 180n103 Don Juan, see Don Giovanni Donizetti, Gaetano, 21n24, 65n80, 112 Lucia di Lammermoor, 6 Duse, Eleonora, 47, 49 E Elia, Enrico, 80 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 7, 22n30, 202n15, 204n32, 208n52

Enlightenment, 9, 187, 192, 232 Ermetismo, 6 Eros, 5, 17, 92n36, 145, 146, 148–151, 153, 154, 169n13 Eros and Thanatos, 5, 17, 92n36, 145–151, 153, 154, 156, 167, 169n13, 172n47 Eroticism, 17, 145–167 desire, 95n50, 145 eros, 79, 91n32, 147, 150, 153–155, 159, 169n22 erotic, 12, 95n50, 145–155, 159, 160, 166, 171n38, 172n46, 174n59, 180n98, 180n103 libido, 150–157 sexuality, 145, 146, 148–151, 153, 154, 169n13 Euripides Hippolytus, 53 Medea, 196 F Falchi, Stanislao Giuditta, 33–35 Fascism, 198 Festival House, see Bayreuth Festspielhaus, see Bayreuth Fiume, 16, 33–55 Florence, 2, 185, 187–190, 201n12, 201n14, 203n22, 206n48 Florentine Camerata, see Camerata de’ Bardi Foscolo, Ugo, 71 Franchetti, Alberto, 52, 113 French Revolution, 194, 232 Fuga, 165, 232, 242n72 Fugue, 28n85, 73, 146, 157–167, 167n1, 177n84, 178n85–87, 179n93 See also Fuga Futurism, 6 “Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi,” 3

 INDEX 

G Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 185 “Montale o l’uomo musico,” 103 Gavazzeni, Gianandrea, 73, 74, 88n14, 105, 106, 129n10, 179n93 Generazione dell’80, 52 Genital, 149, 169n12, 169n13 Genoa, 103, 114, 188 Gesamtkunstwerk, see Total Work of Art Giacosa, Giuseppe, 12, 26n69, 108, 112, 132n38, 132n40, 189 Gianicolo, 48 Giovane scuola, La, 113 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 22n27, 40 Orfeo ed Euridice, 40 Golden Age of Italian Opera, see Italian Opera Goldoni, Carlo, 8, 23n36 Gounod, Charles, 104 Faust, 11, 104, 141n98, 205n38 Gozzano, Guido, 12–14, 21n17, 26n72, 26n74, 26n75, 111, 202n15 I colloqui, 12, 13 La via del rifugio, 12, 13 “Nemesi,” 13 “Paolo e Virginia,” 13 Griffith, David Wark, 4 Gronda, Giovanna, 7, 14, 27n79, 140n98 Grossi, Tommaso, 80 Guarnieri Corazzol, Adriana, 3, 4, 14, 16, 27n78, 40, 41, 56n5, 57n11, 57n20, 59n34, 97n61 Gutierrez, Antonio Garcia, 90n25, 188 H Harmonic series, 220, 237n20, 238n21

269

Harmony, 20n14, 38, 56n7, 118–121, 124, 126, 128, 135n62, 136n63, 178n88, 178n90, 224, 241n54 Hassall, Christopher Vernon, 9, 23n39 Troilus and Cressida, 9 Heart, 17, 35, 55n2, 77, 90n20, 90n26, 92n35, 93n41, 95n48, 97n61, 120–127, 135n60, 137n75, 140n96, 145–167, 183, 191, 211n74 Hebraism, see Anti-Semitism Heine, Heinrich, 78, 79 History, 1, 18, 27n79, 28n82, 44, 67n91, 93n42, 96n52, 111, 125, 127, 140n98, 147, 183–192, 197–199, 200n5, 201n11, 209n63 Hitler, Adolf, 185, 186, 201n12–14 Homosexuality, 86–87n3, 151, 170n25 I Ildebrando di Parma, see Pizzetti, Ildebrando Illica, Luigi, 108, 112, 132n38, 132n40, 189 Imprisonment, 13, 18, 109, 126, 183, 184, 187, 189–194, 197–199, 204n26, 211n73 Interventionism, 80, 93n41 Italianness, 16, 52, 72, 84, 146 Italian Opera, 1–7, 16, 18n3, 26n69, 27n79, 33–55, 106, 112, 113, 140n98, 157, 198, 208n55, 226 J James, Henry, 194 Jealousy, 75, 77, 108, 114, 156, 174n59, 189

270 

INDEX

Joseph II, Emperor, 8 Joyce, James, 210n66 Ulysses, 7 K Kierkegaard, Søren, 152, 170n33 Either/Or, 152 Kimbell, David, 3 L Lake Garda, 54 La Scala, see Teatro alla Scala La Tribuna, 33, 36, 41, 44–46 La Voce, 6, 26n72, 150, 178n89 Leitmotif, 7, 40, 42, 57n17 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 11, 110, 113, 133n44 Goffredo Mameli, 114, 133n45 Pagliacci, 108, 114, 130n18, 133n45 Leopardi, Giacomo, 23n37, 71, 150, 153, 154 “Il pensiero dominante,” 153, 170n37, 171n38 “L’infinito,” 127 Liberovici, Sergio, 9 Libretto, see Opera Liebestod, 147, 168n6 Lina, see Wölfler, Carolina Lonardi, Gilberto, 12, 13, 17, 18, 26n74, 26–27n76, 74, 106, 108, 113, 116, 133n42, 152, 184, 187, 204n26, 225, 226 Lord Byron, see Byron, George Gordon Love, 4, 10, 27n77, 28n80, 59n36, 72–75, 77, 83, 84, 87n3, 90n20, 91n32, 91n33, 95n50, 104, 112, 128, 136n62, 137n74, 137n75, 141n99, 147, 148, 151–158,

165–167, 168n3, 168n6, 171n38, 172n46, 172n47, 174n59, 180n98, 183, 188, 189, 204n26, 215, 224, 229 Lust, 149, 153, 166, 180n103 M Maffei, Clara, 80, 81, 94n45 Mahler, Gustav, 112 Malipiero, Gian Francesco Il sogno di un mattino d’autunno, 52 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 38, 42 Mandelstam, Osip, 2 Manzoni, Alessandro, 23n37, 71, 97n59 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 3 Marino, Giambattista, 21n17 Adone, 8, 22n35 Galeria, 8 Maroni, Giancarlo, 54 Mascagni, Pietro, 8, 11, 20n15, 36, 52, 64n73–75, 112, 127 Cavalleria rusticana, 35, 64n75, 113, 134n49, 225 Iris, 51, 114, 133n47, 134n48 Parisina, 50, 51, 64n73 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 94n46 Filosofia della musica, 81 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 8, 22n35, 48, 63n57 Mediterranean, 16, 35, 41, 46–48, 50, 61n54, 62n55, 63n64 Melodramatic, 22n30, 148, 151, 168n10, 170n26, 194, 210n63 Melody, 56n7, 93n41, 113, 132n41, 148, 149, 161, 165, 166, 169n12, 176n77, 221, 241n54 Melopoetics, 15, 28n82, 29n86, 125, 246 Melville, Herman, 184, 200n3

 INDEX 

Memory, 39, 76, 85, 103, 105, 121, 132n35, 133n47, 135n58, 152, 155, 158, 159, 173n48, 185, 199, 200n3 Mérimée, Prosper, 75, 79, 89n15, 89n16, 91n32 Metastasio, Pietro, 8, 34, 55n2 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 7, 104 Les Huguenots, 104 Michetti, Francesco Paolo, 40, 43 Milan, 1, 9, 49, 51, 56n7, 87n4, 129n8, 130n14, 133n43, 141n98, 207n49, 208n53 Minuet, 119, 136n66, 136n67 Miracle, 17, 103–128 Mogno, Tullio, 165 Montale, Eugenio, 5, 35, 103–107, 145, 183–199, 215, 245 Accordi, 120–122, 164 “Anniversario,” 190, 191 “Ballata scritta in una clinica,” 188–190, 197 “Conclusioni provvisorie,” 191, 196 “Corno inglese,” 120, 122, 123 “Da una torre,” 185 “È ancora possibile la poesia?,” 125 “Il fiore che ripete,” 188, 212n80 “I limoni,” 107, 109, 110, 112, 117, 118, 121, 127 “Il sogno del prigioniero,” 197–199, 212n80 “Il successo,” 104 “In chiave di fa,” 104 “In limine,” 117 “Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria),” 115 La bufera e altro, 17, 183–185, 187, 190, 194, 196, 198, 199, 200n6, 201n12, 206n48, 208n52, 211n73 “La piuma di struzzo,” 104, 105 “La primavera hitleriana,” 185–187, 191, 202n15

271

Le occasioni, 114, 157, 183, 184, 187, 188, 202n15, 207n52 L’opera in versi, 105, 111, 130n17, 191, 195, 201n9, 201n11, 211n73 “Le parole e la musica,” 124 “Meriggiare, pallido e assorto,” 110, 121 “Mia vita a te non chiedo,” 108 “Minstrels,” 123, 124 “Musica silenziosa,” 118–120, 123, 136n66 “Musica sognata,” 123, 138n81 Ossi di seppia, 17, 103–128, 183, 202n15 “Parole in musica,” 125 “Piccolo testamento,” 197 “Pietà di sé,” 195, 196 Prime alla scala, 104, 111, 127, 203n21 “Proserpina e lo straniero,” 9, 23n39, 129n5 Quaderno genovese, 116 Satura, 111, 195–197, 200n6 “Troilo e Cressida,” 9 “Upupa, ilare uccello,” 109, 110 “Violini,” 120, 121 “Violoncelli,” 120, 121 Monteverdi, Claudio, 16, 27n79, 157 Morricone, Ennio, 10 Mosca, 183 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 8, 9, 152, 192, 217, 233 Don Giovanni, 7, 152, 159, 180n103 The Magic Flute, 232 Mulè, Giuseppe, 8 Murger, Henry, 113, 132n40 Scènes de la vie de bohème, 112 Music, 2, 33, 73, 104, 145, 190, 215, 245 Musico-poetics, see Melopoetics Mussinelli, Carlo Alfredo, 11

272 

INDEX

Mussolini, Benito, 66n90, 82, 96n52, 186, 201n12 Mycenae, 49 N National identity, 16, 46, 49, 72, 81, 84, 146 Nationalism, 5, 16, 72, 79–81, 85, 146, 154, 187, 193 Naturalism, 47, 113 Neurosis, 72, 164, 179n91 New York City, 6, 8 New York Opera Company, 8 Nicastro, Aldo, 2, 19n5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 34, 42, 60n41, 62–63n57, 79, 80, 83, 85, 91n31–33, 92n35, 93n38, 150, 169n22, 192, 194, 203n21, 206n47 Beyond Good and Evil, 43, 60n41 The Birth of tragedy, 44–49, 60n44, 63n64 The Case of Wagner, 44, 45, 62n55, 78 Human, All Too Human, 45 Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 45, 61n45, 62n55 Untimely Meditations, 45 Nietzsche vs. Wagner, 43–46, 48, 63n64, 78, 93n38, 192, 193, 203n21 Nietzschean, 16, 47, 49, 78, 158, 167 Nihilism, 45 Novel of the future, 43, 49 O Oedipal, 82, 84 One Thousand and One Nights, 152 Opera, 3, 5, 7–17, 23n36, 23n39, 25n53, 26n69, 26n75, 27n79,

33, 34, 42, 50–52, 55n2, 59n31, 59n34, 72–74, 82, 84, 87n4, 88n11, 89n15, 90n25, 95n50, 104–110, 112, 114, 121, 128–129n5, 133n47, 134n48, 139n88, 140n98, 145, 146, 152, 153, 156, 179n97, 189, 193, 226, 231, 241n48 attacchi operistici, 108 beginnings, 2, 7, 11, 104 desire for opera, 216 Golden Age of Italian Opera, 2, 112 libretto, 3, 5, 7, 9, 12–14, 17, 23n39, 26n69, 27n79, 74, 88n11, 105–107, 110, 121, 128n5, 140n98, 146, 153, 179n97, 209n56, 226, 241n48 melodramma, 3, 19n5, 27n80 opera buffa, 9, 23n36, 179n97 opera seria, 23n36, 34 simulation of, 18, 215–234 Orange (Vaucluse), see Teatro di Arausio P Palazzeschi, Aldo, 3–5, 21n17, 27n76, 105 Palazzo Grassi, 9 Palestrina, Pierluigi, 38, 56n7, 56n8, 62n55 “Peccantem me quotidie,” 37 Parini, Giuseppe, 71 Paris, 4, 49, 53, 54, 89n15, 112, 224, 225 Parola, 4, 25n53, 43, 48, 65n85, 115, 138n87, 139n90, 139n91, 173n48, 177n84, 219, 220, 236n12, 236n13, 237n20 Pascoli, Giovanni, 10–12, 17, 24n53, 25n56, 25n58, 26n69, 96n54, 107, 128, 202n15

 INDEX 

“A Giuseppe Giacosa,” 12 “Assiuolo,” 11 Canti di Castelvecchio, 11 Canzoni di Re Enzio, 11, 24n52 Gretchens Tochter, 11 “Il ritorno,” 11 “Il ritorno di Odisseo,” 11 “Il sogno di Rosetta,” 11 La fine di Mefistofele, 11 “L’antica madre,” 11 “Lontana,” 11 Myricae, 11 Nell’anno Mille, 11, 12, 25n59 Odi e inni, 11, 12 Poemi italici, 12 “A Rossini,” 12 “A Verdi,” 12 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 12 Perseus (myth), 50 Petrarch, see Petrarca, Francesco Petrarca, Francesco, 71, 157 Petrassi, Goffredo Il Cordovano, 9, 23n39, 128n5 Phaedra (myth), 49, 53 Phenomenal world discord, 118 secret order of nature, 109 Piave, Francesco Maria, 84, 87n4, 145 Pirandello, Luigi, 8, 23n38, 174n55, 210n69 Il figlio cambiato, 8 Il fu Mattia Pascal, 196 Liolà, 8 Piranesi, Giovanni, 198, 211n73 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 36, 64n73 Fedra, 53, 65n86 La nave, 52, 53, 65n83 La pisanella, 53 “La sinfonia del fuoco,” 53 Poetry, 2, 36, 72, 103, 145, 183, 215–234, 245, 246

273

Poggioli, Renato, 192, 193, 205n38, 206n39, 206n47 Politeama, 103, 104 Poliziano, 216 Polyphony, 5, 37, 46, 148, 163–165, 179n93 Pope Julius II, 149 Pound, Ezra, 22n32 Cantos, 7 Le Testament de Villon, 7 Powers, Harold, 2, 4, 21n19 Prison, see Imprisonment Proust, Marcel, 137n72 À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 149 Les plaisirs et les jours, 127 Proustian, 85, 121 Psychoanalysis, 72, 78, 79, 91n33, 91n34, 145, 146, 154, 167n2, 169n20, 172–173n48 Puccini, Giacomo, 1–4, 6, 11–13, 18, 19n8, 20n10, 50–52, 64n73, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112–114, 127, 132n38, 132n41, 133n42, 134n49, 184, 189, 190, 197, 225 La bohème, 4, 104, 108, 112, 113 La rosa del Cipro, 50 Madama Butterfly, 113, 225 Manon Lescaut, 50 Tosca, 13, 18, 108, 113, 184, 189, 197 Turandot, 1, 2, 4 Q Quarantotti Gambini, Pierantonio, 73, 88n6, 88n14, 165 R Racine, Jean, 192, 205n38 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 40

274 

INDEX

Recitativo vs. aria, 7, 12, 226 Renaissance, 35, 36, 46, 184, 205n38, 206n47 Rhythm, 11, 59n31, 60n40, 62n56, 106, 136n69, 156, 161, 176n76, 176n77, 209n60, 217, 233, 238n21, 241n54 Ricordi, Tito, 51 Rinuccini, Ottavio, 216, 235n2 Risorgimento, 80, 81, 84, 91n28, 93n42, 133n45, 205n33 Rolland, Romain, 46, 63n64 Romanticism, 9, 38, 94n43, 226 Rome, 23n36, 35, 40, 42, 46, 58n22, 61n49, 90n25, 186, 189, 196, 211n73 Rossini, Gioachino, 2, 7, 12, 112 Il barbiere di Siviglia, 104 S Saba, Umberto, 5, 14, 16–18, 35, 71–86, 105, 112, 145–167, 186, 215–217, 219, 222, 225, 234, 245, 246 Ammonizione e altre poesie, 78 “Autobiografia,” 82, 163 “Canzonetta nuova,” 161 Canzoniere, 17, 74–76, 78, 82, 86n1, 145–150, 153, 156, 160–163, 167, 167n2, 173n50, 175n60 “Carmen,” 75–79, 85, 167 Coi miei occhi, 75, 152 “Congedo,” 164 Cuor morituro, 74, 151, 153, 161 “Della biblioteca civica,” 71, 96n53 “Eleonora,” 49, 74, 153, 156 “Eros,” 79, 147–151, 153–156, 159, 167 Fanciulle, 149

“Finale,” 157, 225 “Il bianco immacolato signore,” 82, 83 Il canto dell’amore, 153 “Il canto di un mattino,” 158 “Il dolore,” 159 “Il lussurioso,” 149 “Intermezzo a Lina,” 76, 77, 80 I prigioni, 149 “La brama,” 149, 151, 153, 154 “La malinconia amorosa,” 151, 152, 165, 180n98 “Leonora,” 74, 77, 156 “L’incisore,” 160 “Malinconia,” 151, 157, 159 “Mio padre,” 72, 82 “Nuovi versi alla Lina,” 147, 151, 168n7 Parole, 161, 169n20 “Preludio,” 73, 164 Preludio e canzonette, 92n35, 148, 157, 160, 161, 164 Preludio e fughe, 73, 146, 148, 157, 162–165, 167n2, 177n84 “Quello che resta da fare ai poeti,” 74, 83, 161, 219 Scorciatoie e raccontini, 78 Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere, 72, 73, 78 “Tre poesie alla musa,” 84 Trieste e una donna, 75, 81, 147, 152, 155 Versi militari, 85 Sacred, 37, 194, 222 San Vito Chietino, 42 Sanguineti, Edoardo, 9, 10, 24n46, 24n51, 74, 122 Sanzogno, Nino, 9 Scarfoglio, Edoardo, 49 Schachtner, Johann Andreas Zaide, 9

 INDEX 

Scher, Steven Paul, 15, 28n83 Schönberg, Arnold, 124, 138n87 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 115, 116, 118, 134n53, 134n54, 154, 171–172n46 World as Will and Representation, 115, 135n54, 140n93 Schuman, Robert, 42, 59n35, 227, 228 Sentimentalism, 3, 4, 10, 12 Sexuality, see Eros Shakespeare, William, 71, 190, 193, 205n34, 207–208n52, 208n55 Falstaff, 193, 207n49 Hamlet, 193, 196, 198, 208n53 Henry IV, 193, 207n51 King Lear, 193 Otello, 111, 193 The Tempest, 193 Shaw, George Bernard, 147, 167, 168n3 Shestov, Lev, 116, 117, 135n55, 135n57 Silence, 63n58, 121, 135n61, 199, 226–228, 233 Singspiel, 226, 241n55 Sivori, Ernesto, 104, 107 Slataper, Scipio, 71 Sonetto, 218 Sophocles, 45 Antigone, 49 Electra, 196 Oedipus Rex, 196 Sound, 2, 16, 37–39, 60n40, 71–86, 110, 117, 118, 121, 123–127, 139n91, 161, 178n88, 217, 221, 231, 234 Spaziani, Maria Luisa, see Volpe Steiner, George, 192–194, 206n43, 206n45, 210n66 Stravinsky, Igor The Firebird, 233

275

The Rake’s Progress, 7, 193, 209n57 Strehler, Giorgio, 9 Superuomo, see Übermensch Svevo, Italo, 71 Symbolism, 6, 38, 51, 56n10, 164, 232 French symbolism, 36, 93n38 Syncretism, 117, 123, 216 T Tasso, Torquato, 216, 235n2 Teatro alla Scala, 1, 9, 23n39, 51, 129n5 Teatro di Arausio, 46 Teatro di Festa, 46–53, 61n51 Theater, 2, 6, 8, 16, 18, 34–37, 46–51, 53–55, 61n51, 63n58, 63n64, 82, 92n37, 103, 104, 107, 128n1, 146, 154, 179n97, 189, 190, 194, 205n32, 205n38, 208–209n55, 216 desire for, 5, 215, 216, 221–226, 231, 240n43 simulation of, 215, 226 theatrical, 215, 226 theatricality, 216, 226 theatrical simulation, 226, 240n43 Toscanini, Arturo, 1, 2 Tosti, Paolo, 8, 41, 58n22, 59n37 “A vucchella,” 41 Total Work of Art, 34, 35, 43, 46–53, 60n39, 203n21, 246 Tragedy death of, 17, 45, 183–199 death of the sense of, 192 Greek, 2, 10, 11, 16, 25n53, 34, 46, 49, 55, 60n39, 62n55, 198, 206n47, 208n55 Mediterranean, 35, 50 modern, 49, 63n64

276 

INDEX

Trieste, 16, 53, 66n87, 71, 72, 78–82, 85, 86n1–3, 91n28, 154 Turin, 112, 174n55 U Übermensch, 42–44, 79, 80, 92n35 Ungaretti, Giuseppe Il porto sepolto, 13, 26n76 “Veglia,” 13, 14 V Venice, 2, 9, 209n57 Verdi, Giuseppe, 2, 35, 71, 104, 146, 190, 224, 246 Ernani, 84, 145 Il trovatore, 18, 77, 80, 109, 184, 187, 195 La forza del destino, 104 La traviata, 80, 93n39, 104 Nabucco, 80 Otello, 35, 174n59 Rigoletto, 76, 77, 80, 85, 87n4, 90n20, 95n50, 147, 180n103 “Trilogia popolare,” 80 Verdi Renaissance, 84 Verga, Giovanni, 113 Verismo, 10, 35, 36, 40, 50–53, 113, 114, 127, 133n43, 134n49, 246 Verlaine, Paul “Art poétique,” 38 Vienna, 8, 53, 66n87, 232 Vittoriale degli italiani, 54 Volpe, 183, 191 Von Weber, Carlo Maria, 226, 227, 229

W Wagner, Richard, 16, 35, 45, 58n27, 59n31, 61n46, 61n54, 79, 112, 146, 186, 246 Lohengrin, 41, 58n26 Parsifal, 45, 61n45, 203n21 Tristan und Isolde, 41–43, 147, 153, 154, 172n46, 192 Wagnerism, 38, 42, 46, 66n86 Walton, William, 9, 23n39, 128n5 Weaver, William, 1, 2, 4 Weininger, Otto, 78, 151, 153, 170n24 Sex and Character, 150, 170n26 Whitman, Walt, 7, 21n23, 21n24 Leaves of Grass, 6, 22n26 “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 6, 12 “Proud Music of the Storm,” 6 Wind, 90n23, 94n45, 118, 122, 123, 137n77, 137n78, 138n80 Wolf, Werner, 15 Wölfler, Carolina, 75 Word and Music Studies, 15 World War I, 13, 18, 53, 66n87, 78, 80, 83, 114, 150 World War II, 84, 187, 198, 202n15, 203n21 Wort-Ton-Drama, 44 Z Zagari, Giovanni, 11 Zandonai, Riccardo, 11, 51, 52 Zeffirelli, Franco, 4, 21n19 Zeno, Apostolo, 8