Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T21:09:04.522Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Young Verdi and Shakespeare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1974

David R. B. Kimbell
Get access

Extract

One of Shakespeare's most eloquent eighteenth-century apologists was an Italian: Dr. Johnson's good friend Giuseppe Baretti, who had acquired the taste during his residence in London in the 1750s. When Johnson's Shakespeare edition appeared, Baretti, now back in Italy again, wrote to request a copy: he wished, he explained, ‘to expound the great tragedian to the ladies of Italy’. Baretti was as good as his word, writing in the literary magazine Frusta in January 1764 of this poet who ‘in both the tragic and the comic style stands quite alone, ahead of all the Corneilles, all the Racines, and all the Molières of Gaul’. And it was Baretti who took up arms against Voltaire, whose prestige as a Shakespeare critic had been hitherto unquestioned in France and Italy, publishing in 1777 his Discours sur Shakespeare el sur Monsieur de Voltaire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 101 , 1974 , pp. 59 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Arturo Graf, L'Anglomania e l'influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII, Turin, 1911, p. 317.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 313.Google Scholar

3 Mario Praz, ‘Shakespeare Translations in Italy’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xcii (1956), 220.Google Scholar

4 Della storia e della ragione d'ogru poesia, iii (Milan, 1743), 149.Google Scholar

5 Praz, op. cit., p. 220.Google Scholar

6 ‘Dei due sistemi tragici moderni più conosciuti’, Opera omma, vi/1 (Milan, 1967), 478.Google Scholar

7 ‘Delia fatalità considerata com’ elemento drammatico', Edizione nazionale degli scritti di Giuseppe Mazzini, viii (Imola, 1910), 185–6.Google Scholar

8 Nulli, S. A., Shakespeare in Italia, Milan, 1918, p. 170.Google Scholar

9 Letter of 19 March 1847, quoted in F. Abbiau, Giuseppe Verdi, Milan, 1959, i. 691.Google Scholar

10 A still earlier Macbet ballet, by Carlo Nichli, performed in Venice in 1814, proves to have nothing to do with Shakespeare, despite a plot that involves assassins, a banquet and a final battle in which Macbet's army is defeated. For Macbet turns out to be the Sultan of Delhi, and apart from one confidant named Macmut the cast is an oriental one of Zamas and Zulimas and Osmanos.Google Scholar

11 Quoted in H. Weinstock, Rossini, London, 1968, p. 66.Google Scholar

12 Letter to Samuel Rogers, 3 March 1818.Google Scholar

13 I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, Milan, 1913, p. 451.Google Scholar

14 Letter to Tito Recordi, 11 April 1857; Copialettere, p. 444 n. 2.Google Scholar

15 Letter of 19 August 1846; ibid., p. 25.Google Scholar

16 Letter of 28 October 1846; ibid., p. 445.Google Scholar

17 Young, C. B., ‘The Stage-History of Macbeth’, The New Shakespeare: Macbeth, Cambridge, 1947, p. lxxiii.Google Scholar

18 Introduction, The New Shakespeare: Macbeth, p. xxxix.Google Scholar

19 Page-references are to the Ricordi vocal score.Google Scholar

20 Letter to Cammarano, 23 November 1848; Copialettere, p. 62.Google Scholar

21 Die Auseinandersetzungen des jungen Giuseppe Verdi mit dem litererischex Drama, Berlin, 1968, pp. 82 ff.Google Scholar