Abstract
In Gadda’s enthralling short story Teatro (1927), a first-person narrator describes a night out at the opera and the plot of the melodrama being performed. The latter is an imaginative concentration of characters and situations which, however, are based on plausible or authentic events. This article examines the fragments of historical fact that weave their way into the fictional plot in an effort to better understand the performance practice which is depicted through Gadda’s distorted lens. It emerges that the primary model for his parody is Wagnerian opera, which was still at the centre of a heated artistic debate. Lastly, a quote from Baudelaire is identified, one that would over time continue to resurface in Gadda’s writings.
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