In February 1925, the 58-year-old playwright Luigi Pirandello met Marta Abba, an unknown actress less than half his age, and fell in love with her. She was to become, until his death in December 1936, not only his confidante but also his inspiring muse and artistic collaborator, helping him in his plans to reform Italian theatre under the Fascist regime. Pirandello's love for the young actress was neither a literary infatuation nor a form of fatherly affection, but rather an unfulfilled, desperate passion that secretly consumed him during the last decade of his life. Bitterly disillusioned by the conditions of the theatrical world in Italy, Pirandello and Abba shared a dream of going abroad to earn their fortune and returning to Italy with the means to establish a national theatre dedicated to high artistic standards. In March 1929, when Marta finally yielded to family pressure and left Pirandello alone in Berlin to revive her Italian stage career and to end rumours over their involvement, he endured a devastating heartbreak and fell into a life-threatening depression - more profound and long-lasting than any of his biographers have yet imagined. The hundreds of letters Pirandello wrote to Abba during these years are the only source that reveals the true story of his relentless torment. Selected, translated, and introduced here for the first time in any language, these powerful and moving documents reward the reader with the unique experience of living in intimacy with a profound poet of human pain.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Nobel Prize-winning playwright Pirandello met the much younger and very lovely Italian actress Marta Abba in 1925, when he was 58. He fell in love. In hundreds of letters, 164 of which are reprinted in this volume, he declared that love over the next 11 years, until his death in 1936. Their relationship, the subject of enduring rumors, was passionate but never consummated. Translated and edited by Ortolani (theater, Brooklyn Coll.), these letters reveal Pirandello the man: depressed, obsessive, full of bitterness and kindness, controlling, and driven by artistic ambition, particularly for Abba and, of course, for the Italian stage under Mussolini's oppressive rule. Pirandello's pain is wrenching; his jubilation true at Abba's success on the Broadway boards. Ultimately, the letters, often signed "Maestro," show a man of enormous complexity and drive who was nevertheless mired in suffering. The letters, 552 in all, will be published in 1995 by Princeton in their original Italian. For academic and large public libraries.
Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
In 1925, Pirandello--at age 58 entering the final decade of his life, his wife confined to a mental asylum, his beloved daughter in Brazil--fell in love with a 25-year-old actress, Marta Abba. From 164 of the 522 letters Abba donated to Princeton University Library before her death, Ortalini (Theater/Brooklyn College) meticulously represents Pirandello's obsessive involvement. As he explains in an exhaustive and occasionally feverish introduction, in a scrupulously detailed chronology, repetitive introductions, intrusive footnotes, and an excessively particularized index, the letters reveal Pirandello's suffering, anguish (``see also Depression/Anxiety, Despair''), his dream of a national theater, the perfidy of his ``enemies'' (other playwrights), and his financial difficulties. They also reveal his insomnia, his various physical complaints, his changing attitude toward the art of film that at various times inspired and revolted him, his business dealings, his restless relocations from Italy to Berlin to Paris, England, America, and his growing international reputation that resulted in a Nobel Prize, a private audience with Mussolini, who resented his travels, and the vast amount of money he seems to have made in spite of his complaints about poverty. He offered frequent apologies to Marta, a busy and successful actress, for his obsessive pursuit in what was to remain an unconsummated and unrequited affair. He also reveals a manic side that the editor overlooks, an egomaniacal belief that God is on his side, having put ``true eternal youth'' in his blood, heart, brain, and that he will write great words that will ``astonish the world.'' In these letters, Pirandello is rarely a lover, more often a case, a pathology, in which love is incidental. He displays the whole range of symptoms, the misery, euphoria, obsession, self- involvement, instability, that Freud suggested the creative personality suffered as the price of his art, the torment and energy behind the ostensibly antic Six Characters in Search of an Author. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An artist's love,
This review is from: Pirandello's Love Letters to Marta ABBA (Hardcover)
Luigi Pirandello was one of the greatest Italian writers, certainly one of the best of the twentieth century. At the age of sixty-eight, he met the beautiful and vivacious Marta Abba, a lovely young actress. Though he was old enough to be her father, Pirandello fell in love with Marta, and she remained his muse, his confidante, and his emotional focus.His letters reveal the many facets of his personality. Some readers might be a little weirded out by the intensity of his feelings for Marta (especially since she never entirely returned them), but many years in the future it's clear that even if she didn't exactly return his feelings, she did care about him, liked him, respected him, and appreciated his feelings about her. "To me he was like a god," she is quoted as saying, even though she got to see all his flaws. And Pirandello's feelings are not those of a dirty old man falling for a much younger woman -- he's revealed, even in old age, as being a very passionate and intense person. In his letters, he often talks about making her a famous actress, and how the two of them would reform the theatre. The foreword written by Benito Ortolani includes his descriptions of meeting Marta herself, in the 1980s, and what she had to say about "the Maestro." Unfortunately there aren't any pictures. The relationship between Pirandello and Marta was a unique one, a mishmash of unusual feelings. Definitely worth the read.
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