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
