No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
I giganti della montagna (The Mountain Giants, 1937) was unfinished when, on December 10, 1936, Luigi Pirandello died. He had hoped with play to shape some of his ambiguities and feelings about art into myth of art. For play, he had chosen neo-romantic or symbolist style that, in hands of Henrik Ibsen and Maurice Maeterlinck, had stressed imagination. Gaspare Giudice suspects that title, if not mood of play, owes to Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Mountains (1911). Pirandello had chosen to include Dunsany play in opening 1925 season of his Teatro Odescalchi. John B. Rey reports that Pirandello began actual work on play sometime in 1929/early 1930. Early, he interrupted work to extract from elements of what became Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me, 1930), and later, in 1929, he again stopped when idea for Quando si e qualcuno (When Someone Is Somebody, 1933) came to him. The play which actors are to perform within I giganti della montagna itself became an independent piece, and, as La favola del figlio cambiato (The Tale of Changling Son), was premiered in Germany in 1934 where its plot of substitution of a black-haired, dark-complexioned, monstrous idiot for handsome, blond Aryan created scandal. It was seen as a stunning refutation of Nazi racist theories and subversive and contrary to directions of German Folk State (Giudice 167, 207; Rey 413, 417). All while, however, Pirandello continued with his plan to add with I giganti della montagna third and concluding myth to social and religious myths that he had evolved in La nuova colonia (The New Colony, 1928) and Lazzaro (Lazarus, 1929). The concept of myth which play employs is not that of gods and cosmic phenomena but of German Romanticism, S. T. Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Friedrich Nietzsche. It sees myth as any idea, true or false, to which people subscribe. Myth gives philosophical meaning to facts of ordinary life by giving concrete and objective shape to the spirit working itself free from natural forms. It is formalized ideal or desire which, by never quite becoming historical fact, motivates and dynamizes present by impelling motion and change. It does so, like art, by giving shape, significance, and direction to chaos of daily experience, and in thirties, especially in Italy under Mussolini, myth carried ideological and political obligations. As his colleague Anton Bragaglia urged, playwrights were to write social myths which might represent, support, and further recent Fascist revolution. Pirandello's several comments in interviews suggest that he did not view myth so conventionally, that, however adaptable its expression was to time, culture, and place, its tendency was natural, part of permanent and universal makeup of man. He supported Alfred Russel Wallace's argument that aspects of human development cannot be explained solely on basis of Darwinian natural selection and struggle for existence. Artistic, mathematical, and musical abilities, for example, do not arise from or impact directly on biological survival. Some unknown spiritual element must be at work as well in elaboration of human brain.(1) Pirandello's myth plays - La nuova colonia, Lazzaro, and I giganti della montagna - seek to affirm, explore, and celebrate manifestations of that unknown element. The long gestation period for I giganti della montagna suggests complexity, confusion, and depth of Pirandello's feelings in regard to art as well as care that he wanted to take in working out feelings. Marta Abba claims, in addition, some responsibility for delay in its completion. She did not much like work. If Luigi Pirandello put aside Giants continually, she relates, it was because I was confused and cold to his first reading. He was accustomed to my enthusiastic reactions to reading of his new plays. …
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.