Word: manzoni
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...contrast, The Sentence, by Giacomo Manzoni, 28, was a shrill, spare twelve-tone work that made fiendishly difficult demands on the singers and left the orchestra pit littered, in the words of one critic, with "the murdered bodies of the instruments." Set in China in the 1940s during the Japanese occupation, the opera told of a wife who betrays her husband to the enemy, is tried by the village council and dismissed with the existentialist in junction: "We neither condemn nor absolve you. You alone can decide whether you were right or wrong, and your soul throughout eternity will...
...Italian, first discovered the works of Giovanni Verga, he wrote enthusiastically: "He is extraordinarily good-peasant-quite modern-Homeric . . ." Best known outside Italy for a minor work-his story Cavalleria Rusticana, on which the libretto for Mascagni's opera was based-Author Verga ranks second only to Manzoni among Italian novelists. Born in Sicily in 1840, he planned as his major work a kind of Comedie Humaine of Sicilian life of which Gesualdo is the second installment (the first: The House by the Medlar Tree -TIME...
...Giovanni Verga, the Sicilian novelist and playwright, is surely the greatest writer of Italian fiction after Manzoni," said D. H. Lawrence. Between the two,'born half a century apart, runs the great divide of 19th century European literature, on the one side romanticism, on the other realism. If Manzoni is Italy's Hugo, Verga is its Flaubert, and its Zola too. Now the finest of Verga's novels, I Malavoglia, is introduced to U.S. readers as The House by the Medlar Tree. The Malavoglia are a family of boatmen. Verga's is the plain tale...
Saint of the Risorgimento. Born in 1785, the son of wealthy Milanese parents, Manzoni spent his early 20s in Paris, became a political liberal and a skeptic. But back in Italy, he returned to the church he had abandoned, and the rest of his life was a parable of the compatibility of Christianity and freedom...
...Betrothed, published when he was 42, Manzoni gave the divided Italians a declaration of national character to which freedom-minded men could rally. Though he never wrote another novel, and in fact did little of later importance, he found himself worshiped as the saint of the Risorgimento. Garibaldi and Cavour paid him homage. And at his death in 1873, Giuseppe Verdi set to work on his great memorial, the "Manzoni" Requiem, and in heartfelt words spoke for his countrymen: "With him ends the purest, holiest, and highest of our glories...