Archivio d’Annunzio | 2015 | N. 2

If the Fuoco is usually interpreted as the Wagnerian novel par excellence, it does not have to be underestimated the support that d’Annunzio gives the Italian music, especially the tradition that comes from Palestrina to Benedetto Marcello and to the divine Claudio Monteverdi, whose name, linked to the Lamento di Arianna, generates a devotional respect among the guests of Foscarina’s house. The exploration of d’Annunzio’s wide musical culture is not original but finds its sources in the Histoire de l’Opéra en Europe by Romain Rolland, already reported by Guy Tosi and now investigated with original results.

Surely Gabriele d’Annunzio used the theatre as a support for his career. Apart from this, his dramas focus on the essential dynamics of obsessive metaphors and myths which were personal of the author. The theatre enables such dynamics to be fully realized. The essay explores La nave as a perfect paradigm of this approach, and also examines La figlia di Iorio and Le Martyr de Saint Sébastien, seeking gestures and developments which reveal impulses towards an endless metamorphosis. This applies to his characters as well, who are transformed from insecure teenagers into heroes who wield power over women and the masses. The combined elements of brutal sex and the search for spiritual purity are already to be found in his early novels, and are a hallmark throughout his work. It follows that silent cinema and great melodrama could only make these elements more explicit ― and here one can find a true legacy from Ibsen. The furious reaction of Catholics to the performance of La nave at La Fenice in Venice in 1908 was due to its most transgressive message: the juxtaposition of the prayers to the Holy Virgin Mary and the hymn to the goddess Venus.

During the First World War, painter Astolfo de Maria is attached to the staff of the Terza Armata and assigned to the service of d’Annunzio as motorcyclist and draftsman. In those war years, the artist writes a diary and does drawings of military subject; thirteen of these are kept at the Vittoriale, while the others, nearly all of which formerly belonging to the archive or to the collection of Adele Macchi de Maria, are now partly at the Venice Foundation, partly in private collections, not always easy to identify. In these drawings, de Maria oscillates between a realism deriving from the direct observation of his subjects – war scenes or persons, the latter being sometimes clearly outlined, sometimes, on the contrary, quickly sketched – and an indulgence to the stylization typical of the Secession. Two works of great importance in de Maria’s artistic career also date back to the war years: Erotic Allegory and Dogaressa (i.e. Doge’s Wife), both adorning the walls of the so-called «Leda’s room» at the Vittoriale. Later on – probably between 1921 and 1922 – Astolfo de Maria would paint a realistic portrait of his commander (tempera grassa on canvas, now at the Venice Foundation), availing himself of photos of the poet taken by his father, Mario de Maria.

Through an examination of the correspondence, published and unpublished, the comparison of the press of the time with the biography and literary production of d’Annunzio, it is possible to know which music he listened to and comprehend his relationships with important musicians during his stays in Venice. This overview of sources can offer useful elements to understand musical references present in the literary works of d’Annunzio. In Venice, early music sacred and profane coexists – like a counterpoint – with contemporary and folk music, the sounds of war combined with the city’s sounds and silence. In Venice there are plenty of organists and organ music; the city gets «resonant like a huge organ», as the musical instrument described in the manuscript entitled Chiomazzurra, conserved by the poet and signed R. Bossi: an «arciorgano» with seven thousand glass pipes reminiscent of the fable told in Il fuoco. The organ becomes the favourite musical instrument, prevails like a basso ostinato in the poet’s life, conducts a «thematic function» in his literary ‘polyphony’ to become, sometimes, ‘leitmotif’ in his train of thoughts.

In studies, more than forty, that the French academic Guy Tosi has dedicated to his favorite Italian author, Gabriele d’Annunzio, between 1942 and 1987, the name «Venice» appears many times. First, Venice is the city where d’Annunzio met French writers and artists: his translator Georges Hérelle, the musician Claude Debussy, the writer Maurice Barres, the dancer Ida Rubinstein. Secondly, Venice is associated primarily to the novel Il Fuoco that Guy Tosi has studied in numerous papers. Retracing these studies, importants also for the discovery of many previously unpublished documents (especially correspondences), this paper aims to highlight the main contribution of the French academic about contacts and reminiscences of French literature in the work of d’Annunzio.

The analysis is dedicated to one of the most pervasive semantic fields of the Notturno, that is the ‘space-time’ of the night: a domain that has fostered the development of metamorphic images. Alternating variations and recoveries, the night-related themes – intending night also as epiphanic ‘space-time’ of mourning, of sacrifice, of self-giving – are analyzed both by a rhetorical point of view and stylistic, while the Venetian promenades that set the rhythm of the textual syntax, describing even the urban space of a Venice obscured by war, are vivid occasions to discover the persistent polymorphism of the first person that lives and writes.

D’Annunzio’s Il Fuoco is largely founded on a complex symbolic ground. Analyzing the tissue of the novel as well as d’Annunzio’s Venetian Taccuini, the essay tries to demonstrate such symbolism with special regard to the representation of Venice. Unlike d’Annunzio’s I World War works Notturno and Licenza, in Il fuoco (1900) Venice embodies mainly positive meanings such as the joy of love, life and artistic creation. Hence, other values are derived and developed: Venice becomes ‘Città anadiomene’, a female symbol of pleasure. Consequently, d’Annunzio’s vision deeply differs from that of other fin de siècle famous writers, who saw in Venice the symbol of melancholy, illness and death. Although d’Annunzio does not deny these features, he efficaciously balances them by opposing positive meanings. Such a narrative strategy finds its fundamental medium in Foscarina, since the woman-actress embodies melancholy as well as vitality and artistic enthusiasm. Indeed a deep link between the woman and the city is traced: Foscarina, whom d’Annunzio often describes as frightened by the flight of Time, is metaphorically associated with the melancholy of lonely places like Calle Gambara as well as with the strong vitality of Venetian garden vegetation. Thanks to this ambivalence, Foscarina emerges as a more complete character than the hero Stelio Èffrena who is connected only to positive values.

The friendship between Gabriele d’Annunzio and Angelo Conti is particularly intense in the years 1894-1900, in the context of Venice. Both of them reflect about Venetian painters and especially Giorgione, whose picture they interpret as an expression of Venetian magnificent life. I analyze the meaning of the form fuoco giorgionesco, also used by Walter Pater in his well-known essay The School of Giorgione. I examine in particular Conti’s references to this text, in order to verify their accuracy. I put forward the hypothesis that, when Conti wrote the monograph Giorgione, his knowledge of the English author was incomplete and came largely from articles published in magazines, from conversations with friends, and from the translation into Italian of only short extracts. I argue that it was unlikely that Conti (and d’Annunzio) had read Pater’s whole work in English, which at the time was little known in Italy.

The narrative function of Foscarina’s character is analyzed starting from the metaphorical field of ‘shadow’: the shadow, infact, connects this character from one side to the autumnal nature of Venice, from the other to the facies nigra of Dürer’s Melancholy. The intent is to highlight Foscarina’s active role inside the novel, and therefore her difference from the other female characters of d’Annunzio. The analysis also aims to show that the two parts of the novel are closely connected through an allegorical and figural relationship, which represents the specific metatextual nature of this novel.

The irredentism of Gabriele d’Annunzio intends to incorporate in a unique country the numerous cities founded by Venice in Istria and Dalmazia. The aim is to recognize the relationships established by the poet with politicians, novelists, and other person in Trieste, before World Word I and after its conclusion with the ‘march to Fiume’. Commentaries on d’Annunzio’s poems, novels, letters, speeches and so on, and also on those produced by many people he was speaking to in Trieste, prove the deep bond between literature and friendship.

Gabriele d’Annunzio’s first encounter with Venice – a city that significantly impacted his literary production – took place during a special journey: a cruise on the Lady Clara, which he took with his friend Adolfo de Bosis in the summer of 1887. The event is an opportunity to start a fascinating discussion on d’Annunzio’s views on travel literature, shedding light on a latent need to conquer that seems to permeate the author’s production. Furthermore, an attentive evaluation of d’Annunzio’s adventure on the Lady Clara as journalistic writing underscores its epic traits. The journey itself emerges as a dynamic mechanism activating literary production, as in the case of d’Annunzio’s Odi Navali and his articles on the newspaper La Tribuna entitled «L’Armata d’Italia».

For several years d’Annunzio plays an outstanding role in the cultural and political redefinition of Venice ruling classes. Whether from literary works or personal exploits, his success is mainly due to ideological messages and fanciful personality; so, at least from the first performance of La nave in 1908, the poet’s flag is hoisted by local nationalist movement and rising economic powers aiming to extend, in the name of a ‘Greater Venice’, italian influence on Adriatic Sea and Balcanic area. Later, during the 1915-18 war, his aerial and naval raids, mainly based in Venice, transform the prophet of the city’s warrior destinies in a hero himself – masterly mixing war of words and real military actions – and give him an unprecedented mediatic appeal. But the apex of his patriotic popularity comes with the post-war slavofobic campaign for venetiannes/italiannes of Istria and Dalmatia and, of course, with the Fiume expedition. The Gazzetta di Venezia, historical newspaper of city establishment, not only faithfully records d’Annunzio’s parable from Venice point of view, but often takes part in it.

The relationship between d’Annunzio and the city of Venice testified by the autographs documents. All the letters and documents, manuscripts or not, written by d’Annunzio kept in many different archives and library of Venice. A consideration to understand and explain the private and political life of the poet-soldier between the end of the Nineteenth Century, the First World War and Fiume. The list, the most completed as possible, of what is kept in the archives and the libraries of Venice signed or written by d’Annunzio.

In the evocative scenery of the city of Venice, the rich correspondence between Gabriele d’Annunzio and Olga Levi Brunner is particularly interesting for the suggestions, both biographical and literary and cultural, which provides. The stylistic variety of tones and themes, in particular, accompanying the ‘chronicle’ of d’Annunzio during his stay in the Serenissima, consisting of continuous reminders and suggestions – which we will find in the narrative productions – and completed by a curious approach of the poet to the Venetian dialect.