Metastasio

by Luigi Russo

Luigi Russo presenta la vita di Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, meglio noto come Metastasio, poeta e librettista italiano del XVIII secolo. Il libro include anche una selezione delle sue opere. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

262 pages, Paperback

Published July 18, 2023

Reviews

[Anya Ciccone · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very, very good book of true scholarly literary criticism. Metastasio is an intensely important yet misunderstood thinker - the last true author to represent Europe's older status quo, prior to the full liberal takeover of the Napoleonic era - but he's extremely misunderstood. I'm actually pretty amazed at Russo's ability to distill Metastasio's accomplishments as concisely and accurately as possible: when he writes, at the end of the introduction, how Metastasio is different from Tasso in developing a kind of internal sensibility, one understands that Metastasio has actually managed to PRODUCE this internal vision, and hasn't simply imposed it (as, say, someone like Shakespeare might). I went into this work with biases, given the Idealist scholarly attitude of the early 20th century, but forgot that a lot of the work was still 100x better than anything following it. Really great stuff.