Metastasio

by Luigi Russo

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

258 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2009

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.