Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

addition to the works already referred to, Verga wrote other novels 16 and collections of short stories. 17 He also wrote a number of plays, based for the most part, like
Cavalleria rusticana,
on his own earlier narratives. The last thirty years of his life were relatively unproductive. In December 1894, he returned for the last time from Milan to Catania, where he settled in the house of his birth in the Via Sant’Anna. He died after suffering a cerebral thrombosis on returning from one of his regular visits to his club, the Circolo Unione, on 27 January 1922.
    G. H. McWilliam
    Professor McWilliam can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected]
NOTES
    1. Introduction to
Little Novels of Sicily
reprinted as ‘Note on Giovanni Verga’ in
Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works
, London: Heinemann, 1968, p. 277.
    2.
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence
, vol. IV (June 1921–March 1924), edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, Cambridge (1987), p. 186.
    3. Ibid., pp. 105–106.
    4. Ibid., p. 115.
    5. Ibid., p. 188.
    6. Many reference books, including
The Oxford Companion to Music
, mistakenly claim that the opera was based on the short story, but every schoolboy knows it was based on the adaptation of the story that Verga prepared for the theatre. Confirmation of this is easily obtained by a comparison of the play with the opera libretto. In his introductory note to
Little Novels of Sicily
, D. H. Lawrence wrote (p. 33) that ‘Verga made a dramatized version of “Cavalleria rusticana”’, and… this dramatized version is the libretto of the ever-popular little opera of the same name.’
    7. ‘Edoardo Sonzogno… instituted a prize competition for one-act operas – the
Concorso Sonzogno
. At first no outstanding work was discovered in these
concorsi
– until in 1889 “Cavalleria rusticana” was brought to light in this way. It is interesting to mention that, before Mascagni entered the work for this competition, Puccini had shown the score to Giulio Ricordi, who rejected it because “I don’t believe in this opera”… (Mosco Carner,
Puccini: a critical biography,
second ed., London (1974), p. 36).
    8.
‘il mito dell’ amore, così come si presenta alla fantasia giovanile, nei suoi urti con la rcaltà’
(L. Russo,
Gli scrittori d’Italia
, Florence (1951), vol. II, p. 753).
    9. In his introductory note to
Little Novels of Sicily
, Lawrence writes (p. 27) that ‘the moment Verga starts talking theories, our interest wilts immediately. The theories were none of his own: just borrowed from the literary smarties of Paris. And poor Verga looks a sorry sight in Paris ready-mades.’
    10. An example of this technique is the reaction of Turiddu, in ‘Cavalleria rusticana’, on hearing that Lola has become engaged during his absence to Alfio, the carter: ‘When Turiddu first got to know about it, Christ in Heaven! he wanted to tear the guts out of that chap from Licodia, he really did!’
    11.
See
D. Woolf,
The Art of Verga
, p. 111.
    12. The title given by Verga to this novella was ‘Fantasticheria’, for which the nearest English equivalent, ‘Daydreaming’, inadequately conveys the ironic contrast between appearance and reality that provides the story with its
raison d’être
. Lawrence’s version of the story is entitled ‘Caprice’.
    13. ‘They’ve killed Turiddu!’
    14. In the introductory note to his own translation of
Little Novels of Sicily
, D. H. Lawrence remarks that ‘most of the sketches are said to be drawn from actual life, from the village where Verga lived and from which his family originally came. The landscape will be more or less familiar to anyone who has gone in the train down the east coast of Sicily to Syracuse, past Etna and the Plain of Catania and the
Biviere
, the Lake of Lentini, on to the hills again. And anyone who has once known this land can never be quite free from the nostalgia for it, nor can he fail to fall under the spell of