Su La città morta, Tragedia

Luigi Pirandello wrote in a review about d’Annunzio’s La città morta that “no one, today fortunately, speaks like the characters in this tragedy”. However, indirectly replying to him as to other detractors, d’Annunzio observed that those who criticised his work showed that they “did not understand what tragic art is”. In support of his poetics, d’Annunzio cited the Sophocles models of Agamennone and Antigone. But there is more. D’Annunzio founded a theatre of ‘high’ speech, which was counterpointed by the silences of the characters and an action that took place mainly in the ‘interiors’. This choice made it possible to propose a peculiar furnishing philosophy related to sepulchral aspects and an intense idea of death. Above all, it was the notion of time that was deeply traversed by d’Annunzio’s experience of the tragic, a sign that the discovery of the tombs of the Atrides – the central topic of the work – on the one hand cancelled the “errors of time“ suspended between a remote past and an inert present, but on the other hand it exhumed a world of terrible passions like incestuous drives. This was intended to be the profound meaning of the tragic theatre founded by d’Annunzio with La città morta.