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D'Annunzio
was the last great Italian tragedian, before Pirandello erased, to say
it this way, this genre with his bourgeois dramas. Among the theatrical
works of the Poet that we will approach next issues we remember: La
figlia di Iorio (1904), La fiaccola sotto il moggio (1905), Più che
l'amore (1906), La nave (1908), Fedra (1909).
Nevertheless
it is interesting to discover the less known side of Gabriele D'Annunzio:
his aesthetic-rhythmic-sensual relationship with music, and in a special
way, throughout a work as the Notturno (1918), prose-composed during
a special moment of pain of the poet, affected by blindness the physicians
deemed incurable.
The
Gabriele D'Annunzio's relationship with music was characterized by an
intensive bind that at any extent did not affect the primacy of letters,
but maybe sided the natural propensity for poetry, overcoming the acknowledgments
and the interest for the figurative arts. As a child, in fact, D'Annunzio
played his father's pianoforte under the guide of the master Odoardo
Chiti; Gabriele, nevertheless, never succeeded in overcoming the technical
difficulties enough to be considered a real musical "genius".
This
"impotence" to find fulfilment in music, did not prevent him, an possibly
with the help of a talent musician, still know unknown, to defend with
assurance Wagner against the thesis of Nietzsche issued in 1893 on the
newspaper "la Tribuna" and then, in 1894, and let him deepening with
an out of common intuition the Tristan und Isolde in the first pages
of the Trionfo della morte; and still to analyse the structure of the
symphony of the opera Arianna by Benedetto Marcello.
So
D'Annunzio was mainly a fan of music, and especially of Beethoven's
music, as it is proved in the pages of the Notturno. Besides the art
collaboration with the nineteenth century melodrama as a librettist-
activity that belonged to a self-promotional will by D'Annunzio as a
manager, as a self-agent that made him be paid prepayments and subsidies-
this regard we remind La figlia di Iorio by Alberto Franchetti in 1904,
Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien, set to music by Claude Debussy in 1911,
the Parisina by Pietro Mascagni in 1913, the Francesca da Rimini by
Domenico Zandonai in 1914, the Sogno d'un tramonto d'autunno by Malipiero
in 1914, Fedra by Ildebrando Pizzetti in 1915, this last author also
of the unfinished Gigliola and the La figlia di Iorio, a belated homage,
dated back to 1954, by the musician to the poet-D'Annunzio remained
an assiduous haunter of concerts, with a strongly sensitive mind toward
musical forms.
So his 'diary' writings (Faville, Notturno e le Cento e cento e cento
e cento pagine del libro segreto di Gabriele D'Annunzio tentato di morire),
where the "night prose" represents a hero, back into perspective, a
man attacked by fair, melancholy, pain, anxiety and where the high poetry
leaves its place to a sincere musical prose and a will to confess one's
own emotions, and constitutes an inwards research often represented
by impressionist images and slant: "Researching myself, I did not find
but my melancholy.
Researching my silence, I did not find but my music", you can read in
the Notturno. And just by the tale of his months of "seclusion" and
privation of light, in his "night" diary it is glimpsed a D'Annunzio,
poetically musician, with lyrically free forms and prospectively 'modern
results, closer to our way of sensing. Alfredo Gargiulo wrote in his
essay issued by the "Ronda" in 1922: "So, the must possibly, the Notturno's
intent was that of developing as a tale, in a more or less realistic
way, those events, but also as a sort of a musical composition, a sequel,
a tangled whole of themes".
Nevertheless
the impressionist excesses leading unavoidable to a construction of
effect, of forced tone, are compensated for by the transfiguration,
in the fight against the death and darkness, of a D'Annunzio reaching
the 'man' stage and poetry, really heroic, whereas the hero is a more
human self. (To be continued)
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