Śródziemnomorski Shakespeare. Libretto Arriga Boita do Falstaffa Giuseppe Verdiego

Abstract

The article presents the circumstances of the creation of Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi, his last opera, one of the two to a libretto by Arrigo Boito. The author reveals behind the scene of working on that masterpiece referring to source materials that include, among other documents, fragments of letters by Verdi, Boito and Giulio Ricordi, translated by the author and published for the first time in Polish. The key features of Boito’s libretto – sources he used, his attitude to Shakespeare’s originals, versification and poetic means are also discussed (the article provides us with the fragments of the libretto both in the original language – Italian and, similarly to the letters, in the author’s translation). The article is an adapted version of fragments of the author’s doctoral thesis Arrigo Boito and his concepts of the opera, supervised by professor Michał Bristiger and defended at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2014.