Carlo Gozzi


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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Gozzi, Carlo

 

Born Dec. 13. 1720, in Venice; died there Apr. 4, 1806. Italian playwright.

Gozzi was the descendant of an aristocratic but impoverished family. He was a military man, but from 1744 he devoted himself to literature and the theater. In his struggle against the Enlightenment playwright C. Goldoni, Gozzi created an original genre of theatrical fable—the fiabe, which utilized plot motifs from folklore and certain principles of the commedia dell’arte (mask characters, dialect, improvisation, and so on). Among such works were The Love of Three Oranges (1761). The Raven (1761). The Stag King (1762), Turandot (1762). and The Green Bird (1765). Gozzi’s fables were characterized by contrast between good and evil, pathos and buffoonery, and archaic literary language and everyday Venetian dialect. They glorified lofty human passions and ridiculed bourgeois egoism: nevertheless, their aim was the “education of the lower classes’* in the spirit of religion and blind obedience to their sovereigns (“A Purehearted Discourse and True History of the Origin of My Ten Fables for the Theater”). Gozzi also wrote 23 tragicomedies in the manner of the Spanish “cape and dagger comedies” and Useless Memoirs (1797), which contain a vivid picture of the theatrical life of Venice. Gozzi was quickly forgotten in Italy, but his fables evoked great interest in F. Schiller and among German and French romanticists. E. B. Vakhtangov staged a brilliant production of Turandot in 1922, and S. Prokofiev composed an opera based on motifs from The Love of Three Oranges.

WORKS

Le Fiabe. Edited by E. Masi. Bologna, 1884.
In Russian translation:
Skazki dlia teatra. Introduction by S. S. Mokul’skii. Moscow, 1956.

REFERENCES

Mokul’skii, S. S. Ital’ianskaia literatura: Vozrozhdenie i Pros-veshchenie.Moscow, 1966.
Reizov, B. G. Ital’ianskaia literatura XVIII v. Leningrad, 1966.

R. I. KHLODOVSII

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
They cover from the refutation of drama to the drama of refutation; the castrato as a rhetorical figure; family, city or state, and theater: Carlo Gozzi and the rhetoric of conservatism; rhetoric and early modern Latin drama: the two tragedies by the "Polish Pindar" Simon Simonides (1558-1629): Castus Joseph and Pentesilea; verse games: meter and interactional German in the Baroque plays of Andreas Gryphius; and rhetoric and the culture net: transnational agencies of culture.
En este sentido, parece interesante mencionar el ejemplo de Carlo Gozzi, quien entre 1767 y 1803 adapto al italiano alrededor de veinte comedias de autores espanoles del siglo XVII (Gutierrez Carou).
The story, based with elaborate deviations on the Carlo Gozzi play La Donna Serpente, tells of the thwarted love between the fairy Ada and the mortal King of Tramond, Arindal.
The Opera holds a special place in history as the last work of Giacomo Puccini, famed composer of popular works "La BohE me," "Madame Butterfly" and "Tosca." Based on Italian dramatist's Carlo Gozzi's play of the same name, the work is notable as Puccini's final composition, still incomplete at the time of his death.
Under French influence, improvised comedies gave way to scripted comedies in the eighteenth century, particularly through the satirical comedies of Carlo Goldoni, who was very influential from the 1730s until his departure to Paris in 1762, and through the fairy tale comedies of Carlo Gozzi.
Per quel che riguarda i rapporti con la commedia dell'arte, i suoi censori, primo fra tutti Carlo Gozzi, lo hanno accusato di aver distrutto con i suoi testi regolari e verosimili la gloriosa tradizione italiana delle maschere e la libera fantasia dell'improvvisazione.
Mae'n stori sydd wedi'i selio ar ddrama Turandot gan Carlo Gozzi, ac sy'n dilyn hanes y Tywysog Calaf sy'n peryglu ei fywyd er mwyn ennill calon a chariad y Dywysoges Turandot.
SEATTLE A Seattle Repertory Theater presentation of a play in two acts by Carlo Gozzi, adapted by Shelley Berc and Andrei Belgrader.
The study is prefaced by an examination of a perceived "Dalmatian Loyalty" to the "Venetian Lion" in the literature of eighteenth-century Venice, focusing in particular on Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi (chapter one).
Carlo Gozzi's The Serpent Woman joins the repertoire of American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.