Don Carlos: declinazioni del tragico da Schiller a Verdi

Abstract

In 1867 Giuseppe Verdi makes a grand opéra out of the dramatic poem Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien (1787) by Friedrich von Schiller. The workshop of Don Carlos lasts twenty years, from 1866 to 1886, when Verdi (re)opens and closes several other workshops (Simon Boccanegra, La forza del destino, Aida, Requiem, Otello), creating a porous work in progress, whose analysis keeps giving us surprises. The libretto by Joseph Méry et Camille Du Locle, under the supervision of the composer, is a palimpsest where, under the official text referable to the common historical nucleus and its best known literary versions, some hidden or deleted heterogeneous texts appear, in a supranational, multilinguistic, intercultural and intertextual dimension, not always stirring along the road of a locatable derivation, of a voluntary imitation, but sometimes taking the shape of an unpredictable dissemination.

Keywords

• Opera
• Intertestualità
• Palinsesto
• Verdi
• Schiller