Italy's founder of tragedy began writing to impress a sick marchesa
Vittorio Alfieri spent his youth on horses, scandals and restless travel, and his first try at drama was a scene left at a lover's house in Turin. When they quarrelled she sent it back. He stretched it to five acts, caught a lifelong hunger for theatrical fame, and became known as the founder of Italian tragedy.
Born at Asti in 1749, Alfieri lost his father early and, at fourteen, came into his own inheritance plus an uncle's fortune. From 1766 he wandered Europe with an English tutor, disliking France, pining over a married woman in the Netherlands and finding his only comfort in the gloomy forests and lakes of northern Sweden. In London an affair with the married Lady Penelope Ligonier ended in a public divorce that ruined her and forced him out of the country. Reading Plutarch, meanwhile, gave him a fierce love of liberty.
Once committed to the stage, he found that years abroad had left his Italian weak; his first two tragedies were drafted in French prose. He moved between Florence and Siena to polish his language, and there met Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, Countess of Albany, unhappily married to Bonnie Prince Charlie. To stay near her he handed his property to his sister in return for an annuity worth roughly half his former income. After she won papal permission to live apart from her husband they eventually settled together, first in Alsace and Paris, and later, fleeing the Revolution, in Florence. His passion for horses never faded; he once went to England purely to buy some.
His tragedies drew on myth and history rather than invented plots, and his early style was harsh and bare, though Saul became his greatest success. Each play centres on a lonely hero of freedom who defies a tyrant, often at the cost of his life, a stance known as titanism. In essays he called poets the natural enemies of tyrants, and he cheered the American Revolution, even dedicating a play to George Washington.
He welcomed the early French Revolution, turned against it during the Terror and mocked the French in a satire of 1799, yet Napoleon still attended a performance of his Virginia. Treating his final illness with his own remedies made it worse. He died in Florence in 1803 and lies in Santa Croce beside Machiavelli.
Source: Vittorio Alfieri
