Her Maestro’s Echo. Pirandello and the Actress Who Conquered Broadway in One Evening (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Her Maestro’s Echo. Pirandello and the Actress Who Conquered Broadway in One Evening Stefano Giannini Pietro Frassica, Her Maestro’s Echo. Pirandello and the Actress Who Conquered Broadway in One Evening (Leicester, UK: Troubador Italian Studies, 2010). 160 pages. With this book, Pietro Frassica returns to a topic very dear to him: the Luigi Pirandello–Marta Abba relationship, the full complexity of which he discovered in the mid-1980s while reading the hundreds of letters that constitute their correspondence. Frassica presented his findings in two books: A Marta Abba per non morire (Milan: Mursia 1991) and Caro Maestro . . . Lettere a Luigi Pirandello 1926–1936 (Milan: Mursia 1994). However, certain conclusions he had drawn on those occasions, particularly biographical, were, in his words, not to his satisfaction. With Her Maestro’s Echo, Frassica successfully renews his investigative efforts and achieves a convincing explanation of biographical incertitudes, discusses the notion of “incompleteness” that marks several of Pirandello’s most important plays, and further elaborates on the relationship between Marta and her Maestro. The Maestro of the title is in fact the name with which Marta addressed the man who, in the last decade of his life, devoted [End Page 163] himself to the creation of art for his muse: plays in which she starred and built her reputation as the Pirandellian actress par excéllence. Frassica writes: Much has been written about Pirandello [ . . . ]. Marta’s side of the story, on the other hand, has never adequately been told, and on certain points I feel a sense of duty to her to give her a fair hearing. (7) A life can be told using letters, personal memories, written memoirs, and official documents. In his book, Frassica tells the story of Marta and Pirandello by skillfully reviewing four elements: Pirandello’s letters to her written between 1925 and 1936; Frassica’s personal memories of the encounters he had with the actress to discuss the editing of such letters in 1984 (a project never carried out, as Frassica himself explains, pp. 155–58); official documentation regarding Marta’s personal life in the U.S.; and finally, to contrast the author’s acute reading of the most controversial aspects of Pirandello’s life, memoirs of the playwright’s family members. The events presented in this book are structured into four chapters between introduction and epilogue. The first chapter analyses the personal and artistic relationship between Marta and Pirandello. Pirandello went through the pangs of love, always unrequited, and Frassica shows the mechanism by which Pirandello’s letters may be read both as messages of passion and as stimuli of artistic production, as opposed to Marta’s often impatient replies. The second chapter delves into the political climate surrounding their interaction. Frassica makes no excuses for Pirandello’s decision to become a member of the fascist party. Still, he also effectively explains Pirandello’s “impolitical” nature and his “exceedingly complex relationships” (65) with a regime that induced him to abandon Italy (with Marta), in pursuit of an art “[in]subservient to political ideology” (63). The third chapter describes Pirandello’s instant attraction to cinema. His letters display both his understanding of the power of the new technology and his decision to enter the arena of filmmaking to probe new territories and to expand his art in a way that would also afford Marta the means to become a movie-star: two goals that, as Frassica explains, for Pirandello, are one and the same. The last chapter focuses on Marta’s life after Pirandello’s death. For the first time, readers will find information on her personal life in the U.S. Midwest in the 1930s and 1940s, on her WWII wartime struggles in a then-enemy country, and, in pages that shed new light on the then tightly controlled Italian theatrical scene, on her trying comeback to Italy where, because of her relationship with Pirandello, Marta faced personal and artistic hostility. Readers soon find out that the two kinds of hostility—personal and artistic—merge into one. I want to stress the personal tone of the epilogue of Her Maestro’s Echo in which Frassica recounts his professional relationship with the aging actress (including...