Undici sonetti per una suite. Michelangelo e Šostakovič

Abstract

The essay analyzes Shostakovich’s Suite on verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti for bass and piano (op. 145), composed in 1974, drawing upon the theory on hypertext and literary translation by the semiologist Augusto Ponzio. Shostakovich, certainly inspired by the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (op. 22) by Benjamin Britten, which he listened to in Moscow in 1966, assembles and sets to music 14 poems by Michelangelo Buonarroti in Abram Efros published posthumously in 1964). Shostakovich also invents 11 titles for the resulting ‘sonnets’ (Truth, Morning, Love, Separation, Anger, Dante, To the exile, Creativity, The night (dialogue), Death, Immortality), thus providing them with a paratext that ‘models’ its content and creates an original metatext with its own fabula clearly linked to the composer’s biography. The texts that Shostakovich extrapolates from Efros’s collection are included in the Appendix, alongside the source Italian text (one of the editions from which Efros translated, i.e. Cesare Guasti’s edition of 1863), in an attempt to retrace the particular ‘rewriting’ procedure of Michelangelo’s poems united in a dramaturgically cohesive cycle offered to the Soviet public of the 1970s.