Carlo Gozzi

Gozzi, Carlo (1720–1806), Venetian aristocrat, playwright, and memorialist, who reworked a number of old fairy tales for the theatre. Like his brother Gasparo, a distinguished journalist and writer of Aesopic fables, Carlo Gozzi was a leading figure in the literary circles of 18th‐century Venice. Culturally conservative, he opposed Enlightenment innovation, especially when it radically changed the nature of the theatre. He held to the tradition of the commedia dell'arte with its improvisation, its stock situations and stock characters like Pantaloon, Punchinello, Harlequin, and Columbine; he was the sworn enemy of Carlo Goldoni, the greatest Venetian playwright, whose realistic scripted comedies swept away the old conventions. Gozzi espoused a sophisticated theatre of fantasy and set out to prove to Goldoni that this would attract the public away from the latter's social critiques. His sequence of successful capricci scenici or fiabe drammatiche began with L'amore delle tre melarance (The Love of Three Oranges, 1761), based on a story in Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti (The Pentameron, 1634–6). It was the first of ten fairy‐tale plays written in the short period 1761–5, for which Gozzi drew upon existing collections of stories such as Basile's, as well as the oral folk tradition, oriental sources (especially The Arabian Nights, published by Antoine Galland in French as Les Mille et une nuits in the years 1704–17), and the commedia dell'arte itself which provided Gozzi with some of his characters. His Turandot was also performed in 1761, and among the later notable and seminal pieces were: Il re cervo (The King Stag), Il mostro turchino (The Blue Monster), La donna serpente (The Serpent Woman), and L'augellin belverde (The Green Bird). In these plays fairy‐tale fantasy is wedded to comedy and satire. Later Gozzi modelled his work on Spanish theatrical precedents, nostalgically evoking a courtly mood. Finally, he left one of the great autobiographies of a period rich in such meditative and confessional writing: his Memorie inutili (Useless Memoirs, 1797–8) offer an insight into his views on the theatre.

Gozzi's work was highly influential abroad, if not in Italy, partly through the interest of northern romantics: Alfred de Musset and, earlier, Mme de Staël in France, and in Germany, Goethe, Lessing and the Schlegels admired the plays, while Schiller translated him, creating an adaptation of Turandot for Goethe to direct. From Gozzi's own times onwards, but especially in the early 20th century, numerous fairy‐tale operas by composers of various nationalities were based upon his plays, most famously Puccini's Turandot (1924); there are also an early Wagner version of La donna serpente (Die Feen, started 1833, produced 1888), a Busoni Turandot (1917), Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges (1919), and Henze's König Hirsch (Il re cervo, 1956).

Bibliography

• Bentley, Eric (ed.), The Genius of the Italian Theatre (1964).
• Gozzi, Carlo, Fiabe teatrali: testo, introduzione e commento, ed. Paolo Bosisio (1984).
• ——Carlo Gozzi: Five Tales for the Theatre, trans. Ted Emery, with introduction (1989).
• Salina Borello, R., Le fate a teatro: le Fiabe di Carlo Gozzi tra allegoria e parodia (1996).

— Ann Lawson Lucas

Carlo Gozzi

Princess Turandot, performance by Yevgeny Vakhtangov (1922)

Carlo, Count Gozzi (13 December 1720 – April 4, 1806) was an Italian dramatist, known for his play The Green Bird.

Biography

Born in Venice, he came from an old Venetian come from the Republic of Ragusa. His father's debts forced him to look for a means of supporting himself, and at the age of sixteen, he joined the army in Dalmatia; three years later he returned to Venice, where he soon made a reputation for himself as the wittiest member of the Granelleschi society, to which the publication of several satirical pieces had gained him admission. This society, nominally devoted to conviviality and wit, had serious literary aims, and was especially zealous to preserve Tuscan literature from foreign influence.

The displacement of the old Italian comedy by the dramas of Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni's works, modelled on French examples, threatened to defeat the society's efforts; in 1757 Gozzi came to the rescue by publishing a satirical poem, La tartana degli influssi per l'anno 1756, and in 1761 by his comedy, The Love of Three Oranges or Analisi riflessiva della fiaba L'amore delle tre melarance, a parody of the manner of the other two poets, founded on a fairy tale. To perform it, he obtained the services of the Sacchi company of players, who, thanks to the popularity of the comedies of Chiari and Goldoni--which offered no scope for the display of their peculiar talents--had been left without employment. Their satirical powers thus sharpened by personal enmity, the play was an extraordinary success.

Struck by the effect produced on the audience by the introduction of the supernatural or mythical element, which he had merely used as a convenient medium for his satirical purposes, Gozzi produced a series of dramatic pieces based on fairy tales, which were briefly popular, but after the breaking up of the Sacchi company were completely disregarded. They were much praised by Goethe, Schlegel, Madame de Staël and Sismondi; and one of them, Turandot or Re Turandote, was translated by Friedrich Schiller.

In his later years Gozzi began to produce tragedies in which the comic element was largely introduced; as this innovation proved unacceptable to the critics he turned to the Spanish drama, from which he obtained models for various pieces; these had minor success.

His brother, Gasparo Gozzi, was also a well-known writer of the time.

His collected works were published under his own superintendence, at Venice, in 1792, in 10 volumes.

A number of twentieth century stage works were inspired by Gozzi. These include treatments of Turandot by Karl Vollmöller and Bertold Brecht, operas based on the same story by Busoni and most famously Puccini and Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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