Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Piave, Boito, Pirandello: From Romantic Realism to Modernism by Deirdre O'Grady (review)

2003; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mlr.2003.a827507

2222-4319

Catherine O’Rawe,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

218 Reviews Piave, Boito, Pirandello: From Romantic Realism to Modernism. By Deirdre O'Grady. (Studies in ltalian Literature, io) Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter : Mellen. 2000. xviii+134pp. $?9-95- ISBN 0-7734-7703-9. Deirdre O'Grady's ambitious study proposes to reassess the position of the librettist in nineteenth-century ltalian literature and to posit the librettoas the 'missing link' (p. 3) between Romantic realism and the modernism of Pirandello, identifying the nexus of drama, melodrama, and opera as a key element in this transition, and thus essentially proposing an alternative trajectory for a century whose literary landscape is too often dominated in Italy by the novel. O'Grady's aim is to trace a thematic progression or continuum along two separate but related lines. Firstly, she examines the figureof the jester in Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse (1832) and its adaptation by Francesco Maria Piave for Verdi's Rigoletto (1851) and argues the case for its influence on the figure of Ciampa, the cap-and-bells-wearing raisonneur in Pirandello'sTY berrettoa sonagli (1918). Secondly, she identifies a topos of tragic and grotesque physical deformity in Rigoletto, arguing that the anatomization ofthe physical in Boito's lyric poetry, and in the scapigliatura in general, subsequently evolves into the theme of psychological collapse and the internalization of external deformity in Boito's Otello, leading to Pirandello's dissection of madness as mental deformity in //berretto. O'Grady attempts to balance these disparate elements, with the consequence that, ultimately, neither argument is allowed adequate space: her book is perhaps several books in one. For example, a detailed study of the influence of the Shakespearean and Rabelaisian fool on the Pirandellian raisonneur, via the commedia d'arte, hinted at here, would be very welcome. Moreover, O'Grady's thematic approach is used rather at the expense of a consi? deration of the formal problems inherent in the idea of musical adaptation: spoken and sung theatre may well be part of a 'single cultural continuum', as Richard An? drews notes in the introduction, but the aesthetic questions raised by adaptation need to be explored in all their complexity. Nowhere is this need to address ques? tions of form more urgent than in the case of Pirandello. O'Grady's close reading of //berrettoa sonagli notes the play's fundamental opposition of madness and rea? son, which is supported semantically by a consistent opposition and manipulationof the terms coscienza and vero, and she offers us an intriguing genealogy for Ciampa, the lowly cuckold-wmomta, in Hugo's jester, 'pleurant des pleurs de sang sous mon masque rieur', and in Rigoletto's master's injunction: 'Fa' ch'io rida, buffone!', and resituates the play as a study of class relations in newly bourgeois Sicily. However, a consideration ofthe Pirandellian approach to form and genre would be valuable here: Pirandello himself was deeply aware of literary adaptation as a problem, both theo? retical and practical, as he adapted his own works for the stage (including //berretto, which, as O'Grady discusses, was an adaptation of two earlier novelle). In his 1908 essay 'Illustratori, attori e traduttori', Pirandello addressed specifically the problem of adapting drama for musical theatre, calling it a 'contaminazione indegna'. In his essentially Romantic conception of the artwork, the sacredness of the unique written work would inevitably suffer an irreparable loss when moved into another context. Although he retreated from this hardline position in later years, and even wrote an unpublished librettohimself in 1932, based on his play La favola delfiglio cambiato, for Gian Francesco Malipiero, it is obvious that the issue of literary adaptation is never uncomplicated in Pirandello and deserves a thorough discussion of its own. By approaching Pirandello from a differentdirection, and casting new light on the relation between Pirandello and the scapigliatura (hitherto explored by critics mainly in the context of the relation between Pirandello and Carlo Dossi), O'Grady's book provides a starting point for future, and more detailed, explorations of the relation MLR, 98.1, 2003 219 between opera and theatre and between melodrama and modernism, which may prove very fruitful. University of Exeter Catherine O'Rawe ltalian Pulp Fiction: The Nezv Narrative of the...