The Improvisatori (also spelled "improvvisatori") were a group of Italian improvisational poets who first appeared during the Trecento,[1] and gradually disappeared around 1840.[2] Although few written copies of their poems exist today,[3] the importance of the improvisatori to Italian literature is significant for both their original poetic compositions as well as for the effect they had on the Italian madrigal[4] and the role they may have played in preserving older Italian epics.[5]
James Haar traces the figure of the improvisatore (the singular male form of "improvisatori") back to the middle of the 14th century.[5] Throughout the Renaissance (which Haar defines as the period spanning 1350 to 1600), an improvisatore or improvisatrice (singular feminine form of “improvisatori”) was unlikely to glean a living solely from performing improvised poetry (although some, like the Brandolini brothers of the 15th century[6] achieved a modicum of renown). Instead, the improvisatori of the Renaissance were likely to have participated in religious festivals and community celebrations, performing mainly for their friends and neighbours. During this time, however, the improvisatori were closely linked with the performance of sung madrigals, as well as the recitation of Italian oral epics, and the survival of these songs and poems is due in large part to the improvisatori of the Renaissance.[7]
During the Italian literary "period of decadence," which spanned most of the 17th century, Italian literature as a whole produced little notable work. Although the improvisatori likely continued to exist in some fashion during the 17th century, they did not contribute significantly to Italian literature for most of the century.
1690, however, marked the dawn of what Benedetto Croce dubbed a "Golden Era" ("epoca d'oro") of Italian improvisational poetry, which would last until around 1840.[8] During this time, not only did the numbers of the improvisatori increase greatly, but their influence on Italian literature likewise expanded. During the first half of the 18th century, the French diplomat Charles de Brosses wrote about encountering a famous Florentineimprovisatore named Bernardo Perfetti,[9] and expressed admiration for Perfetti’s ability to express "true feeling"[3]” in his extemporaneously-composed poetry. By 1754, the improvisatori were relevant enough within Italy that the Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni published a play titled Poeta fanatico, in which the protagonist is an improvisational poet.[3] During the second half of the 18th century, the importance of the improvisatori continued to increase.
By the dawn of the 19th century, the influence of the improvisatori had expanded beyond the realm of art, and improvisational poets like Corilla[10] were receiving the laurel of Petrarch, Italy's highest poetic honor.[11] Moreover, the improvisatori were by this time so widely respected that they were frequently lauded in foreign travel journals (see “Significance outside of Italy”).
The improvisatori continued to enjoy widespread fame and success during much of the Romantic Era. Improvisatori like Tommaso Sgricci mingled with leading English Romantic poets, including Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.[12] Early 19th century novels, like Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy (1807) and Francesco Furbo’s Andrew of Padua (1820), featured improvisatori as protagonists. By 1840, however, the popularity of the improvisatori had begun to wane, likely due to some combination of stagnation in form and their overexposure to foreign tourists.[13][14] However, academic interest in the improvisatori remained strong until the end of the nineteenth century, and numerous articles were published on topics ranging from the relation of the improvisatori to the German Meistersinger[15] to the effect Sgricci had on the poetry of Shelley and Byron[16]
The performance
In his Remarks on Antiquities, Art, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy..., a work "cited as a travel classic for over a century",[17]Joseph Forsyth describes an encounter with an improvisatrice as follows:
This lady convenes at her house a group of admirers, whenever she chooses to be inspired… She went round her circle and called on each person for a theme. Seeing her busy with her fan, I proposed the Fan as a subject. In tracing its origin she followed Pignotti and in describing its use she acted and analyzed to us all the coquetry of the thing. She allowed herself no pause… So extensive is her reading, that she can challenge any theme. One morning, after other classical subjects had been sung, a Venetian count gave her the boundless field of Apollonius Rhodius, in which she displayed a minute acquaintance with all the Argonautick [sic] fable.[18]
This improvisatrice (Signora Fantastici) and her rival La Bandettini were street performers, who would frequently pass a hat around before, during, and after improvisations, into which appreciative listeners would make donations. However, there were other settings and styles in which improvisatori might perform.
Beyond using the streets as theatres, some improvisatori performed at private shows. The less-famous of these improvisatori frequently performed at private residences, in which "a small table with writing implements, and an old shattered jingling piano, occupied one side of the room, and a small space was left in front for the poet."[19] Other, more famous improvisatori like Tommaso Sgricci and Bernardo Sestini, could sell out entire theatres, and had to be accompanied by retinues of bodyguards.[20][21] In both types of private performances, the improvisatore or improvisatrice would still take suggestions for topics to perform on. However, rather than listening to the audience call out themes, the poet requested that audience members write down suggestions on spare pieces of paper and deposit them in a box before the show.[22][23] The suggestions would then be read to the poet and the audience at the same time, and seconds later, the poet would begin his composition (these readings could elicit significant audience reactions in their own right – Lord Byron reports that, upon hearing "the apotheosis of Vittorio Alfieri" suggested as a topic for Sgricci to improvise upon, "the whole theatre burst into a shout, and the applause was continued for some moments"[24]).
In addition to private performances, nationally-celebrated improvisatori (like Sgricci, or Corilla Olimpica, the improvisatrice whose fame and high repute in Italy inspired Madame de Staël's novel Corinne, or Italy, before him) could be called upon to improvise for state functions and national celebrations,[25] while lesser-known improvisatori might solicit donations from wealthy foreign travellers. Moreover, rural improvisatori continued performing for family and neighbours in Tuscan villages, just as their predecessors in the Renaissance used to do.[26] Whatever the occasion or setting, the improvisatori rarely failed to impress their audience. Forsyth writes:
An Italian improvisatore has the benefit of a language rich in echoes. He generally calls in the accompaniment of song, a lute, or a guitar, to set off his verse and conceal any failures. If his theme be difficult, he runs from that into the nearest common place, or takes refuge in loose lyrick [sic] measures. Thus he may always be fluent, and sometimes by accident be bright… Such strains pronounced and sung unmediated, such prompt eloquence, such sentiment and imagery flowing in rich diction, in measure, in rhyme, and in musick [sic], without interruption, and on subjects unforeseen, all this must evince in [the improvisatore] a wonderful command of powers… [27]
Significance outside of Italy
Portrait of Madame de Staël as Corinne on Cape Misenum by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (Geneva)
Despite the significant role the improvisatori played in Italian literature from the Renaissance onward, non-Italian recognition of the medium was slow to crystallize. The first French mention of the improvisatori came in de Brosses's letter, which was written circa 1750.[28] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first published English mention of the word “improvisatori” or any of its variants came in 1766, with the publication of Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy.[29] During the Romantic Era (c. 1785–1830), however, the improvisatori were frequently mentioned in published travel journals. French writers interested in the improvisatori included Madame de Staël (author of Corinne, or Italy [published 1807], a novel in which the protagonist is an improvisatrice) and Antoine Claude Pasquin (better known as Valery; he mentions no fewer than four improvisatori in his Historical, Literary, and Artistic Travels in Italy… [written between 1826 and 1828]), while the Dutch[citation needed] had Hans Christian Andersen (author of The Improvisatore, published in 1835), and the Germans had Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (whose Italian Journey was written between 1786 and 1788, but not published until 1816).
Despite heavy Continental European interest in the improvisatori, the poets were most enthusiastically admired in England, where they influenced the poets Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Laetitia Landon, among others.[30] The improvisatori naturally appealed to Romantic writers captivated by concepts like William Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of emotion" and the broad Romantic concept of untutored genius.[31][32]
Criticism of the Improvisatori
Although the improvisatori were almost universally admired, the degree of admiration varied considerably. Some writers, like Mary Shelley, believed that extemporaneous composition seemed to connote "a divine inspiration"[33] in the performer. Others, like Byron,[34] were more skeptical. Esterhammer notes "available paradigms for representing the nineteenth-century improvisatore… ranged from Romantic genius to manipulative professional, and responses varied from ridicule to rapture."[35]
It is important to note that while some criticism was directed at the quality of an improvised poem, most critiques were instead focused on the incompatibility of improvisation with the written medium. So, while Caesar notes that the Anglo-Irish diarist Anna Jameson classified one particular improvisation of Sestini’s to be "a failure",[36] and Forsyth discusses an improviser unable to satisfactorily end his performance ("with each verse, he further complicated his plot, frustrating himself and his audience [until] he cursed 'Maledetto!’ and ran off"[37]), these sentiments are exception, rather than rule. Instead, it is far more common for writers to complain about the supposed inconsistencies of improvised works – inconsistencies that usually appear once an improvised poem is examined in a written medium. For example, Byron told Shelley "[Sgricci’s] printed poetry is tame stuff"[38] during a conversation about the phenomenon of improvisational poetry. Similarly, Forsyth lamented
Lady Fantastici [has] a wonderful command of powers; yet, judging from her studied and published compositions, which are dull enough, I should suspect that this impromptu exercise seldom leads to poetical excellence. Serafino d'Acquila, the first improvvisatore that appeared in the language, was gazed at in the Italian courts as a divine and inspired being, till he published his verses and dispelled the illusion.[39]
The notion that improvisers were skilled performers who possessed "skill, practice, [and] talent; but none of the felicities of higher art"[40] frequently accompanied accounts of improvisation, forming a curious contrast with prevailing opinions that improvisers exemplified the Romantic notion of untutored genius.
Romanticism is an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. In most parts of Europe, it was at its peak from approximately 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of the past and nature, preferring the medieval to the classical. Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and the prevailing ideology of the Age of Enlightenment, especially the scientific rationalization of Nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature; it also had a major impact on historiography, education, chess, social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics: Romantic thinking influenced conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.
This article focuses on poetry from the United Kingdom written in the English language. The article does not cover poetry from other countries where the English language is spoken, including Republican Ireland after December 1922.
James Henry Leigh Hunt, best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet.
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a Genevan and French woman of letters and political theorist, the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a leading salonnière. She was a voice of moderation in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era up to the French Restoration. She was present at the Estates General of 1789 and at the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant between 1794 and 1810 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time. She discovered sooner than others the tyrannical character and designs of Napoleon. For many years she lived as an exile – firstly during the Reign of Terror and later due to personal persecution by Napoleon.
Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of mock-heroic works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio.
Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, and lasted approximately from 1800 to 1850. Romantic poets rebelled against the style of poetry from the eighteenth century which was based around epics, odes, satires, elegies, epistles and songs.
Luigi Pulci was an Italian diplomat and poet best known for his Morgante, an epic and parodistic poem about a giant who is converted to Christianity by Orlando and follows the knight in many adventures.
Western literature, also known as European literature, is the literature written in the context of Western culture in the languages of Europe, and is shaped by the periods in which they were conceived, with each period containing prominent western authors, poets, and pieces of literature.
Greek love is a term originally used by classicists to describe the primarily homoerotic customs, practices, and attitudes of the ancient Greeks. It was frequently used as a euphemism for both homosexuality and pederasty. The phrase is a product of the enormous impact of the reception of classical Greek culture on historical attitudes toward sexuality, and its influence on art and various intellectual movements.
'Greece' as the historical memory of a treasured past was romanticised and idealised as a time and a culture when love between males was not only tolerated but actually encouraged, and expressed as the high ideal of same-sex camaraderie. ... If tolerance and approval of male homosexuality had happened once—and in a culture so much admired and imitated by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—might it not be possible to replicate in modernity the antique homeland of the non-heteronormative?
— words chiselled onto the tombstone of John Keats, at his request
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Morgante is an Italian romantic epic by Luigi Pulci which appeared in its final form in 1483; a now-lost 23-canto version likely appeared in late 1478; two other 23-canto versions were published in 1481 and 1482. The work was commissioned by Lucrezia Tornabuoni.
The Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men comprised ten volumes of Dionysius Lardner's 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846). Aimed at the self-educating middle class, this encyclopedia was written during the 19th-century literary revolution in Britain that encouraged more people to read.
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was a British writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."
Thomas Medwin was an early 19th-century English writer, poet and translator. He is known chiefly for his biography of his cousin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and for published recollections of his friend, Lord Byron.
The sonnet was a popular form of poetry during the Romantic period: William Wordsworth wrote 523, John Keats 67, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 48, and Percy Bysshe Shelley 18. But in the opinion of Lord Byron sonnets were “the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions”, at least as a vehicle for love poetry, and he wrote no more than five.
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Scholars regard the publishing of William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as probably the beginning of the movement, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end. Romanticism arrived in other parts of the English-speaking world later; in the United States, it arrived around 1820.
Maria Maddalena Morelli Fernandez, also known by the Arcadian pseudonym Corilla Olimpica, was a Florentine Italian poet, improvisatrice, and musician. The official poetess to the grand ducal court in Florence (1765–1775), she won fame as the foremost female performer of the improvised poetry then popular in Italy, and was controversially crowned with the laurel wreath on the Roman Capitol in 1776, an event later fictionalised by Madame de Staël in Corinne, or Italy.
References
↑ Philip T. Jackson, "Review: (untitled)", The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 19, No. 3, (Autumn, 1988).
↑ Benedetto Croce, "Gli improvvisatori", La Letteratura Italiana del Settecento (Bari: Laterza, 1949)
1 2 3 Lindsay Waters, "The Desultory Rhyme of Don Juan: Byron, Pulci, and the Improvisatory Style", ELH, Vol. 45, No. 3, (Autumn, 1978), Johns Hopkins Press, p. 431
↑ Mark Jon Burford, "Cipriano de Rore's Canonic Madrigals", The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 17, No. 4, (Autumn, 1999), pp. 459–497. Published by the University of California Press
1 2 James Haar, Essays on Italian Poetry and Music During the Renaissance, 1350–1600. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986. Print. pp. 76–99
↑ Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, During an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803. Boston, Wells and Lilly, 1818. Print. p. 58.
↑ James Haar, Essays on Italian Poetry and Music During the Renaissance, 1350–1600. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986. Print. p. 83
↑ Benedetto Croce, "Gli improvvisatori", La Letteratura Italiana del Settecento (Bari: Laterza, 1949). Pp. 299–311.
↑ Charles de Brosses, Lettres Familières sur l’Italie, ed. Yvonne Bezard, 2 vols. [Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1931], 1:385–387
↑ Avriel Goldberger, "Introduction", in Corinne, or Italy by Madame de Staël. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Print. Pp. xxix–xxx.
↑ Madame de Staël, Corinne, or Italy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Print. Pp. 19–20.
↑ Jeffrey C. Robinson. "Romantic Poetry: The Possibilities for Improvisation" Wordsworth Circle; Summer2007, Vol. 38 Issue 3, p. 94
↑ Lindsay Waters, "The Desultory Rhyme of Don Juan: Byron, Pulci, and the Improvisatory Style", ELH, Vol. 45, No. 3, (Autumn, 1978), Johns Hopkins Press, p. 438
↑ James Haar, Essays on Italian Poetry and Music During the Renaissance, 1350–1600. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986. Print. p. 97
↑ "Of the Maistersingers' Gracious Art", The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 34, No. 606 (April, 1893), p. 457
↑ H. Buxton Foreman, "The Improvisatore Sgricci in Relation to Byron", The Gentleman's Magazine, 1880. Pp. 115–123.
↑ Keith Crook, "Introduction", Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Print. P. xi.
↑ Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, During an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803. Boston, Wells and Lilly, 1818. Print. p. 59.
↑ Michael Caesar, "Poetic Improvisation in the Nineteenth Century: Giuseppe Regaldi and Giannina Milli," The Modern Language Review, Vol. 101, No. 3 (Jul., 2006), p. 701
↑ Avriel Goldberger, "Introduction", in Corinne, or Italy by Madame de Staël. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Print. P. xxxviii
↑ Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, During an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803. Boston, Wells and Lilly, 1818. Print. p. 60.
↑ Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, During an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803. Boston, Wells and Lilly, 1818. Print. Pp. 60–61.
↑ Charles de Brosses, Lettres Familières sur l'Italie, ed. Yvonne Bezard, 2 vols. [Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1931], 1:385–387
↑ "improvisatore, n.1"The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. February, 2010
↑ Jeffrey C. Robinson. "Romantic Poetry: The Possibilities for Improvisation" Wordsworth Circle; Summer 2007, Vol. 38 Issue 3, p. 94
↑ Jeffrey C. Robinson. "Romantic Poetry: The Possibilities for Improvisation" Wordsworth Circle; Summer2007, Vol. 38 Issue 3, p. 94
↑ Lindsay Waters, "The Desultory Rhyme of Don Juan: Byron, Pulci, and the Improvisatory Style", ELH, Vol. 45, No. 3, (Autumn, 1978), Johns Hopkins Press, p. 434
↑ Mary Shelley's Journal, Ed. Frederick L. Jones, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947. p. 141.
↑ Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted during a Residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the Years 1821 and 1822, London: Henry Colburn, 1824. p. 166
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