Archivio d’Annunzio | 2017 | N. 4

The artistic path of young Gabriellino d’Annunzio, undertaken against his father’s will, has a decisive starting point with the frequentation of the Royal School of Acting in Florence between 1904 and 1905. The director of the School is the Italian actor and man of letters Luigi Rasi, with whom d’Annunzio himself, with the mediation of Eleonora Duse, has different artistic collaborations from the debut of Gioconda in 1899 to the rehearsals of Francesca da Rimini in 1901. Gabriellino takes part in the ‘artistic lectures’ directed by Rasi, whose teachings constitute an important trace in his future theatrical career. Two letters from Rasi to d’Annunzio and the correspondence of Gabriellino with the other students of the School, along with their memories, allow to understand more clearly the cultural and literary value of a theatre that was first of all, as later defined by Marino Moretti, «a meeting of poets in the search of the new».

According to Silvio D’Amico and the Fascist regime, staging La Figlia di Iorio at the 1934 Volta Conference would show the world a perfect example of the rising Italian direction, especially considering that high-level international figures joined to rewrite this masterpiece in Mediterranean rustic literature, thirty years after Michetti’s and Talli’s realistic and pictorial legendary première. However, putting together avant-garde and tradition was a gamble that did not work out. Pirandello, De Chirico, Ruggeri and Marta Abba (who had been recommended) reluctantly participated in the endeavour and did not manage to meet expectations. This was the umpteenth missed opportunity in the history of Italian theatre, and d’Annunzio polemically distanced himself from it.

At the origin of the two stage shows there is the idea of commemoration: September 11, the anniversary of the march on Ronchi, for La Figlia di Iorio to Vittoriale in 1927 and the homage to the Vate who has disappeared for a few months to represent La Nave in Venice in 1938; two different ways of celebrating and ritualising the event/theatre out of the theatre. And while in the first case, in a celebratory context he himself cared for, d’Annunzio became an enthusiastic promoter of a significant updating of the theatrical practice, in 1938 the regime finalised the event to an exaggeration of the duce’s politics in the lagoon marking a substantial distance from the ideological motives that had prompted the author to carry out his work.

During the twentieth century there were numerous productions of Gabriele d’Annunzio pastoral tragedy La Figlia di Iorio. Interpretations of the text have been offered in particular in the field of director’s theatre, with diverse outcomes. This article analyses the theatre productions presented in Italy by Luigi Squarzina (1957), Paolo Giuranna (1972), Giancarlo Cobelli (1973) and Roberto De Simone (1982). They were directors who, through their work, confirmed the extraordinary vitality of d’Annunzio’s text as an inexhaustible source of new interpretative stimuli.

Moving from the analysis of Eleonora Duse’s acting technique and its reception during her life, the three feminine leading characters of two plays (Sogno di un mattino di primavera and La città morta) and a novel (Il Fuoco) by Gabriele d’Annunzio are closely investigated in relation with the symbolic conception of the space displayed in those works. La Demente, blind Anna and Foscarina are all inspired by Duse’s stage skills. Not only can they interweave a visionary and passionate relationship with the nature that surrounds them – a gorgeous garden in Tuscany, the arid ruins near Mycenae and the famous maze in Villa Pisani near Strà – but also their bodies can detect and translate the archetypes of universe. Our aim is to show how deeply their intimate conception is in debt with the idea of an unconscious sensor of cosmic forces, of a multi-souls actress like Eleonora Duse.

In the autumn of 1907, Vera Komissarzhevskaya commissioned the poet Valerij Brjusov to translate the text of the tragedy Francesca da Rimini by Gabriele d’Annunzio, never staged in Russia. Unbeknown to the actress, Bryusov gave his translation of the tragedy to Alexander Lensky, director of the Malyj Theater in Moscow. When Komissarzhevskaya was informed about Bryusov’s dishonesty, she was deeply sorrow for the poet’s behaviour. Nonetheless, the actress faced the situation and won the challenge. On 1 September 1908, Francesca da Rimini was premiered at the Malyj Theater in Moscow, directed by Lensky. On 4 September 1908, Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s Dramatic Theater company staged the tragedy by d’Annunzio at the Ermitazhe Theater in Moscow, directed by Nikolay Evreinov. The article reconstructs this intricate story.

This paper focuses on the literary and dramaturgical variants existing between Le Chèvrefeuille and Il ferro, whose subjects are identical. As a matter of fact, d’Annunzio wrote the two tragedies in parallel, helped by Casa Fuerte for the French version. The title Le Chèvrefeuille is the crossing point of a semantic net formed by the French variants; the long stage directions that characterise this work deepen the dramatist’s attention for the actors’ interpretation in symbolist terms.

The first staging in Italy of the drama Il ferro by Gabriele d’Annunzio, in January 1914, took place in production circumstances that were very peculiar and unique for the theatre scene of the time. Indeed, after the performance of the French version in December 1913 in Paris, with the title Le Chèvrefeuille, d’Annunzio’s theatrical text needed a major publicity launch. And, indeed, there is no doubt that its organisational process was quite bizarre. Preceded by long negotiations with the impresario Adolfo Re Riccardi, the composition of this text, not among Vate’s luckiest one, was certainly late compared to the backer’s expectations. Especially, the precedence given to the French version, which can be considered different, set in motion the will to create an event for the best of the audience attracted by the idea of assisting to the world première of a new text by d’Annunzio. On the evening of Tuesday the 27th of January Il ferro was staged in Rome, at the Teatro Valle and in Turin at the Teatro Carignano, while in Milan it took place at the Teatro Manzoni on the day after, Wednesday the 28th of January. The press described these evenings enthusiastically appreciating especially the actors’ performance, among the best in Italy: in Rome it was the Company of Ugo Piperno and Lyda Borelli with Teresa Mariani; in Turin Virginia Reiter, Nera Carini and Luigi Carini; in Milan Tina di Lorenzo, Emilia Varini and Febo Mari.

D’Annunzio wrote ékphrasis and stage directions with a strong literary connotation. His descriptions of paintings as well as opening scenes stress in particular the details, giving a poetic aura to the vision, which is at the same time hyper-realistic and elusive. The linguistic vividness of d’Annunzio is examined in these two forms of speech, the ékphrasis and the stage directions, to bring out the characteristics of a ‘pictorial’ theatre. The centre of this analysis is the tension between word and image, between the contents communicated by the first and the contents expressed or evoked by the latter. The article proposes the analysis of some theoretical writings and theatrical texts. At the end we suggest a contemporary feature of d’Annunzio’s theatre in term of “denarrativisation” of the theatrical scenes in a visual way.

Il delitto di Giovanni Episcopo is the filmic version of the short novel Giovanni Episcopo (1892) by Gabriele d’Annunzio. The film title explains in melodramatic tones the result of a terrible story concerning betrayed sentiments and the frustrated dignity of an office worker in Rome during the end of nineteenth century. Love for the wife Ginevra and mostly for his little son Ciro allows Episcopo to bear disappointments, naughtiness, violences and humiliations inflicted to him by the amoral Giulio Wanzer, the lover of his wife, until, in a defence gasp of his paternal pride, Episcopo kills him before constituting to the police.

Musical accompaniment of films entered a new era as a dramaturgic practice in 1914, thanks to the world-wide success of Cabiria. Giovanni Pastrone’s ‘Dannunzian’ film played an important role in the creation of moving picture orchestras and synchronised scores. Manlio Mazza’s compiled score paved the way to the comparable orchestral accompaniment of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), written by Joseph Carl Breil. Nevertheless, scholars have paid insufficient attention to Mazza’s score, which has been overshadowed by the famous Sinfonia del fuoco by Ildebrando Pizzetti. The latter has been frequently associated with the sacrificial scene in the temple of Moloch and, thus, has been used in modern exhibitions of the film. Despite this spread interpretation, it is important to note that Pizzetti did not write his symphony to score this scene. The misunderstanding leading to this association is due on the one hand to an aesthetic assumption, perhaps a bias, against the practice of compiled scores and, on the other, to some incomprehension concerning the restoration process of this film. In this article I re-examine the vexata quaestio of the relationship between the film and Pizzetti’s Sinfonia del fuoco, by analysing the 1931 sound reissue of Cabiria, which featured a newly composed score by Luigi Avitabile and José Ribas. The latter’s accompaniment of the temple of Moloch scene, including a chorus and a baritone soloist (as in the Sinfonia del fuoco), explains beyond any reasonable doubt the origin of the misplacement of Pizzetti’s piece, and why it has dragged on for so long.

This paper focuses on d’Annunzio and Carmelo Bene. Namely, it is dedicated to the reading actor’s of the tragedy La figlia di Iorio and to the performance realised at the Teatro all’Angelo in Rome (1999). The relationship between the actor and d’Annunzio determines a significant evolution of Carmelo Bene’s art, which is linked to the theme of myth and primitiveness.

In May 2007, the theatre company Tiezzi-Lombardi enacted d’Annunzio’s Sogno di un mattino di primavera, originally written for Eleonora Duse in 1897. Though respectful of his language, the company created a new dream-like version. The stage design by Fabrizia Scasellati Sforzolini and the particular setting in the court of the Bargello Museum in Florence make for an essential geometric stage writing, in which the actors play with exact anti-naturalistic voice and physical action, countered by Sandro Lombardi’s frail transfiguration into the main female role of the Demente. In his interpretation, built over a detailed phonetic study and on both estrangement and embodiment actor’s techniques, lays the secret of the re-creation of d’Annunzio’s work. At the same time, the overall interpretation conveys the impossibility of reason to grasp the mystery of life, already inscribed in the text, while showing the means towards a contemporary sense of the tragic.

Eleonora Duse relives here her loves, from her parents to Martino Cafiero, from Arrigo Boito to Gabriele d’Annunzio. Moreover, thanks to a special liking for letters she reads or recites, she reviews the different times of her career, from the thwarted beginnings to the triumphs and the fatigue of a stressful tournée and her uncertain health. This monologue is divided into seven stations, almost a secular way of the cross, where the contradictory personality of the actress emerges, torn between disgust and deep desire towards the stage.