We the Italians June 13, 2014 - 34 | Page 8

Interview: Pierpaolo Polzonetti

When he was forced to flee to America, chased by creditors, he had to start all over again - a forerunner of his countrymen who later made the same trip - and became the first professor of Italian at Columbia University. There he taught Dante, because he was convinced thatthe beauty of the Italian language lied in poetry, and argued that it was necessary to fall in love with the musicality of the Italian language before studying its grammar. Italian never became an international lingua franca, but thanks to his work a few steps in that direction were taken at least. Thanks to Italian opera –an international genre - many citizens in all the cities of the culturally advanced West, including, for the first time, New York, heardthe Italian language.

The operas we are talking about, anyway, were born as local productions, and they were dialectal, even if they ended up being exported abroad. Some were adapted, for example many roles in Neapolitan were translated into Tuscan. In the long run,this in part is how the Italian language was born, just at a time when Italian opera becamethe only international genre of opera.

This means that the Italianused was simplified, to become very functional, tied to great mimicry, and with a great ability to convey ideas with music and actions so that even those unfamiliar with Italian would still be able to grasp the meaning and the message. This also explains why there was no directreference to revolutionary ideals: it was all very symbolic and metaphorical, with dramatic scenes very easy to understand, almost as in the commedia dell’arte.

So when the Americans nowadays mock the Italians for making too much gestures, they refer to a tradition that somehow has noble origins: the art of mimicry allowed artists to, through a musical outline, communicate with people who did not know the language...

Interesting. I never thought about this, but it is plausible. The export of Italian theatre began before the operas in the 500s with the commedia dell'arte. How was it possible that the Italian companies had such a tremendous success abroad, when they were performing in Italian or in a dialect? Thanks to the language of gestures. It was certainly a very different gestural expressiveness from today, but it was and remains a fundamentally Italian means of communication, especially abroad.

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