- Performer Name:
- Sgricci
- Performance Venue:
- Pisa
- Performance Date:
- 1820
- Author:
- Shelley, Mary
- Date Written:
- 1820-21
- Language:
- English
- Publication Title:
- The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- Article Title:
- Page Numbers:
- 1:171-72,174
- Additional Info:
- Ed. Betty T. Bennett
- Publisher:
- Johns Hopkins
- Place of Publication:
- Baltimore
- Date Published:
- 1980
Text:
[171] I have now an account to give you of a wonderful and beautiful exhibition of talent which we have been witnesses of.* An exhibition peculiar to the Italians and like their climate — their vegetation and their country fervent fertile and mixing in wondrous proportions the picturesque the cultivated & the wild until they become not as in other countries one the foil of the other but they mingle and form a spectacle new and beautiful We were the other night at the theatre where the Improvisatore whom I mentioned in my last letter delivered an extempore tragedy. Conceive of a poem as long as a Greek Tragedy, interspersed with choruses, the whole plan conceived in an instant — The ideas and verses & scenes flowing in rich succession like the perpetual gush of a fast falling cataract. The ideas poetic and just; the words the most beautiful, scelte** and grand that his exquisite Italian afforded — He is handsome — his person small but elegant — and his motions graceful beyond description: his action was perfect; and the freedom of his motions outdo the constraint which is ever visible in an English actor — The changes of countenance were of course not so fine as those I have witnissed on the English stage, for he had not conned his part and set his features but it was one impulse that filled him; an unchanged deity who spoke within him, and his voice su{r}passed in its modulations the melody of music. The subject was Iphigenia in Tauris. It was composed on the Greek plan (indeed he followed Euripides in his arrangement and in many of his ideas) — without the devision of acts and with chorus's. Of course if we saw it written there would have been many slight defects of management, defects — amended when seen — but many of the scenes were perfect — and the recognition of Orestes and Iphigenia was worked up beautifully.
I do not know how this talent may be appreciated in the other cities of Italy, but the Pisans are noted for their want of love and of course entire ignorance of the fine arts — Their opera is miserable, their theatre the worst in Italy. The theatre was nearly empty on this occasion — The students of the University half filled the pit and the few people in the boxes were foreigners except two Pisan families who went away before it was half over. God knows what this man wd be if he laboured and become a poet for posterity instead of an Improvisatore for the present — I am enclined to think that in the perfection in which he possesses this art it is by no means an inferior power to that of a printed poet — There have been few Improvisatores who have like him joined a cultivated education and acquirements in languages rare among foreigners — If however his auditors were [172] refined — and as the oak or the rock to the lightning — feeling in their inmost souls the penetrative fire of his poetry — I shd not find fault with his making perfection in this art the aim of his exertions — But to Improvise to a Pisan audience is to scatter otto of roses among the overweighing stench of a charnel house: — pearls to swine were oeconomy in comparison. As Shelley told him the other night He appeared in Pisa as Dante among the ghosts — Pisa is a city of the dead and they shrunk from his living presence. The name of this Improvisatore is Sgricci, and I see that his name is mentioned in your literary pocket book.*** This has made me think that it were an interesting plan for this same pretty pocket book if you were to give some small interesting account — not exactly a biographical sketch, but anecdotical and somewhat critical of the various authors of the list. Sgricci has been accused of ca{r}bonarism whether truly or not I cannot judge — I should think not or he wd be trying to harvest at Naples instead of extemporizing here. From what we have heard of him I believe him to be good and his manners are gentle and amiable — while the rich flow of his beautifully pronounced language is as pleasant to the ear as a sonata of Mozart. I must tell you that some wiseacre Professors of Pisa wanted to put Sgricci down at the theatre and their vile envy might have frightened the God from his temple if an Irishman who chanced to be in the same box with him had not compelled him to silence. The ringleader of this gang is called Rosini**** a man, a speaker of folly in a city of fools — bad envious talkative presumptuous; — one — "chi mai parla bene de chichesisia — o di quei che vivono o dei morti."*****
[174] […]*On 21 December Mary Shelley, Shelley, and Claire Clairmont went to the theater to see Sgricci's improvisations of "a Canzone upon Pyramus & Thisbe" and a tragedy, "Iphegenia in Tauris" (CC Journals).
**"Select."
***The Literary Pocket-Book; or, Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art, an annual pocket calendar that contained a variety of useful data (currency rates; coach schedules; shop addresses; lists of persons in the arts, science, and government), as well as original prose and poetry. Begun by Leigh Hunt and printed for him by Charles and James Ollier, it appeared for five years beginning in 1819.
****A professor at the University of Pisa, Rossini was a man of wide learning and a poet. He regarded Sgricci as mediocre and tried to stem his popularity (Dowden, Shelley, II, 368-69).
*****"Who never speaks well of anybody whatsoever — living or dead."
Notes:
- Collected by:
- DP