Born: Asti, Italy, 16 January 1749. Education: Educated at Royal Academy, Turin, 1759-66. Military Service: Served as an ensign, 1766 (resigned commission, 1774). Career: Travelled extensively in Europe, 1767-72; began lifelong relationship with Luisa Stolberg, Countess of Albany, 1777; fled from revolutionary Paris with the Countess, 1792, settled in Florence; left Florence during the French occupation. Died: 8 October 1803.
Publications
Collections
Opere postume. 13 vols., 1804.
Opere, edited by Francesco Maggini. 1926-33.
Opere, edited by Luigi Fasso and others. 35 vols., 1951-.
Opere I, edited by Mario Fabini and Arnaldo DiBenedetto. 1977.
Antologia Poetica, 1993.
Plays
Tragedie. 3 vols., 1783-85, enlarged edition, 1789.
Tragedie. 6 vols., 1787-89; edited by U. Brilli, 1961.
The Tragedies, translated by Charles Lloyd. 4 vols., 1815; revised edition, edited by E.A. Bowring, 2 vols., 1876; with introduction by Sergio Romagnoli, 1993.
Commedie, edited by Simona Costa. 1990.
Verse
L’America libera: Odi. 1784; as Ode to America’s Independence,translated by Adolph Caso (bilingual edition), 1976.
Parigi sbastigliata. 1789.
Rime. 1789.
L’Etruria vendicata. 1800. Other
La virtu sconosciuta: Dialogo. 1786.
Della tirannide. 1789; as Of Tyranny, translated by Julius A. Molinaro and Beatrice Corrigan, 1960.
Delprincipe e delle lettere. 1795; edited by Luigi Rosso, 1943; as The Prince and Letters, translated by Julius A. Molinaro and Beatrice Corrigan, 1972.
Il misogallo: prose e rime. 1799.
Vita. 1806; as Memoirs, translated anonymously, 1810, revised edition, by E.R. Vincent, 1961; as The Autobiography of Vittorio Alfieri, translated by C. Edwards Lester, 1845, and by Henry McAnally, 1949; as Life of Vittorio Alfieri, 1877. Mirandomi in Appannato Specchio, 1994.
Translator, Panegirico a Trajano, by Pliny. 1787. Translator, [Works], by Sallust. 1826.
Critical Studies:
Vittorio Alfieri: Forerunner of Italian Nationalism by Gaudens Megaro, 1930; Alfieri: A Biography by Charles R.D. Miller, 1936; Ritratto dell’Alfieri by Mario Fubini, 1967; Saggi alfieriani by Walter Binni, 1969; Studi e ricerche sulla genesi e le fonti delle commedie alfieriane by Giuseppe Santarelli, 1971; Alfieri comico by V. Placella, 1973; Studi alfieriani vecchi e nuovi by Carmine Mensi, 1974; Gli affetti nella tragedia di Vittorio Alfieri by Pino Mensi, 1974; Vittorio Alfieri by Guido Nicastro, 1974; Di Vittorio Alfieri e della tragedia by F. Portinari, 1976; II messaggio poetico dell’Alfieri: La natura del limite tragico by Mario Travato, 1978; Vittorio Alfieri (in English) by Franco Betti, 1984; Vittorio Alfieri e la cultura piemontese fra illuminismo e rivoluzione edited by Giovanna Ioli, 1985; Lo Stile e l’Idea: Elaborazione dei Trattati Alfierani by Guido Santato, 1994; Studi Alfieriani by Walter Binni, 1995; L’altro Alfieri: Politica e Letteratura Nelle Satire by Giulio Carnazzi, 1996; Il Nano e il Gigante e Altri Studi Alfieriani by Massimo Manghi, 1998; Tra Mito e Palinodia: Itinerari Alfieriani by Guido Santato, 1999; Vittorio Alfieri e le Sue Tragedie by Pietro Seddio, 1999.
”A truly remarkable individual,” Vittorio Alfieri was called by his contemporary Alessandro Verri, a judgement anyone will concur in who reads the Vita (Memoirs) without being waylaid, as earlier critics were, by doubts as to their reliability. From 1775, after having spent six restless years in intellectually stimulating European travels and three years in frivolous aristocratic pursuits in Turin, Alfieri turned to literature, and henceforth his life was intensely and singlemindedly devoted to his studies and his writing. His major public objective was to give Italy tragedy, the genre it lacked almost completely and which had recently been brought to new splendour in France. To achieve this he had to master a language which, as a French-speaker since birth, was virtually foreign to him. The project came to fruition in 19 tragedies (23, if the first one, rejected by him, and the so-called posthumous ones are added), their range, according to George Steiner, ”an index to the romantic imagination.” The style he forged for himself was unique, a radical departure from the melodious, often sing-song verses for which Italian lyric poetry, thanks to the Arcadia and Metastasio, was famous. ”Mi trovan duro? . . . Taccia ho d’oscuro?” (”They find me difficult/harsh? … I have the reputation of being obscure?”), he asked in an epigram dated 30 July 1783, harbinger of his repeated efforts at self-clarification.
Alfieri’s tragedies have been classified variously: chronologically by periods, treated as Greek, Roman, and modern; by themes, as tragedies of love, freedom, royal ambition, familial affections, and inner struggle; or again, as those in which fate predominates, those built on the contrast between liberty and servitude, and those in which the tyrant triumphs over his victims. But no doubt the best comprehensive commentary on his work—which he approaches both diachronically and synchronically—is his own self-exegesis: in his answer written to the critic Calsabigi in 1783, in his ”Parere dell’autore su le presenti tragedie” [The Author's Opinions on the Present Tragedies] prepared for the 1789 Paris edition, repeatedly in the Memoirs, and indirectly but forcefully in Del principe e delle lettere (The Prince and Letters). What distinguishes Alfieri’s perception of his originality is his self-knowledge: his grounding of the impulse that led him to tragedy in his passionate reaction to great deeds (such as those recorded in Plutarch’s Lives) and his desire to emulate them in the only arena—art—in which he felt his times gave him freedom to act; and secondly, his intimate understanding of the stubborn determination needed to vanquish the difficulties of a genre which he conceived of as exceptionally concentrated and concise, making no allowances for even such normal procedures in drama as the use of secondary characters and episodic actions. Basing himself on the distinctions of classical theories of rhetoric between inventio, dispositio, and elocutio (the selection of a subject, its distribution into its component parts or acts and scenes, its expression, which in his case meant turning it into verses), he detailed the various stages through which each of his tragedies passed, incidentally leaving an analysis of composition, a blueprint for the construction of a text, which continues to be valid even today. The unity he achieves is not given; it is arrived at. But in a circular movement that goes back to the moment of ”inspiration”—the impulso naturale, the bollore di cuore e dimente (the natural impulse, the excitement of heart and mind), so eloquently described in The Prince and Letters—he ends up by giving its due to the inescapable coherence of content and form in great art.
From the point of view of inventio (or originality), Alfieri thought of his tragedies as falling into two groups: the few ”new” ones (on subjects never before treated in tragic form) and the majority, in which he strove to ”make something new out of something old.” Among the first group are two of his recognized masterpieces, Saul and Mirra, both of which depart from the model most frequently associated with Alfieri, the unmasker of arbitrary power and its trappings as analysed in the treatise Della tirannide (Of Tyranny). In the dramatization of the struggle between the aged Biblical king and the young David, in which the accent falls on the human rather than regal destiny of the ”tyrant” condemned to fearful solitude, even the usual norms of neo-classical tragedy are broken by the insertion into the text of David’s songs (passages that remind us that Alfieri was also a great lyric poet, in the tradition of Petrarch). In his retelling on stage of Ovid’s story of the incestuous love of Mirra for her father, Alfieri defies the rules of bienseance and creates a work of the utmost dramatic tension as the hapless protagonist—no more than a young girl—is again and again on the verge of revealing a secret (to which the spectator who knows his classics is privy), whose ultimate telling spells self-imposed death.
