- Performer Name:
- Sgricci
- Performance Venue:
- Paris, Lucca
- Performance Date:
- 1820
- Author:
- Medwin, Thomas
- Date Written:
- Language:
- English
- Publication Title:
- The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Article Title:
- Page Numbers:
- 265-66
- Additional Info:
- Ed. H. Buxton Forman
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Place of Publication:
- London
- Date Published:
- 1913
Text:
[265] Sgricci also passed some evenings at his house. [266] He was perhaps the greatest of improvisatores that ever existed, and gave us more than one specimen of his talent. He used to say that "the God when invoked was always propitious." He was on his way to Lucca, there to give a tragedy on the stage, as he had done at Paris, where his improvisations were taken down in shorthand, and published; but they did not bear strict criticism, though they abound in passages of great beauty. Shelley went to Lucca, to be present at his acting, and came back wonderstruck; of several subjects proposed at random, he selected the Iphigenia in Tauris, and I remember Shelley's admiring greatly his comparing Orestes to one high column, all that remained for the support of a house. Shelley said that "his appearance on the stage, his manner of acting, the intonations of his voice, varied to suit the characters he impersonated, had a magical effect, and that his Chorusses in the most intricate metres, were worthy of the Greeks." Had Shelley read this Play, he would in all probability have formed a different estimate of its Merits. Several of those which he improvised at Paris were afterwards published from the Shorthand Transcripts but are totally unfit for the Closet. This was, I believe, the last time Sgricci appeared on the boards of a theatre. He soon after obtained a pension from the Grand-duke of Tuscany, and his pension extinguished his genius. There is a proverb, that singing birds must not be too well fed! He died in 1826 or 1827, still young.
Notes:
- Collected by:
- DP