Don Álvaro, or, The Force of Fate

Translator’s Preface

T RANSLATOR’S PREFACE o] On Sunday, March 22, 1835, Don Álvaro, or the Force of Fate (Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino) by Ángel de Saavedra, duke of Rivas (1791–1865), premiered at the Teatro del Príncipe in Madrid. It had a run of eleven days, which, by the standards of the time, made it a success.1 And it changed the Spanish stage at one fell swoop, closing—and resoundingly so—the door on the narrow constraints and rules of neoclassicism and opening that of the freedom of expression of the romanticism that had been sweeping through Germany, England, and France. The Duke of Rivas, having sided against the absolutist king Ferdinand VII and fearing reprisal, had fled Spain in 1823 to live in exile—successively in Gibraltar, London, Malta, and France—until 1834. He returned to his homeland after Ferdinand’s death, when the latter’s widow, María Cristina, declared an amnesty. During this time he wrote a great deal, especially poetry, little by little distancing himself from the neoclassical tragedies, like Aliatar (1816) and The Duke of Aquitaine (El duque de Aquitania, 1817), that he had written as a young man. Influenced by other Spanish exiles, especially his friend Antonio Alcalá 1. Ricardo Navas Ruiz, El romanticismo español, 4th ed. (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1990), 179. ix x T R A N S L AT O R ’ S P R E F A C E 2. Gabriel Lovett, The Duke of Rivas (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), 18–19. Galiano, and on Malta by John Hookham Frere2, who introduced him to Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott, and urged him to read the Spanish greats, like the playwright Lope de Vega, Rivas gradually moved to a more personal, more “individual” expression, one of the hallmarks of romanticism and the tenets of Jean Jacques Rousseau. He wrote the first draft of Don Álvaro in Tours in 1832 or 1833, then reworked parts of the play before its premiere in 1835. With its complete freedom in the use of time; its five jornadas (acts); its mysterious, passionate, valiant hero and melodramatic heroine; and its overheated plot and mixture of prose and verse, Don Álvaro, or the Force of Fate shattered the neoclassical rules that then held sway. And it has drama, and action, and declamation, and it freed the individual to state his or her emotions. All of this was utilized to the fullest extent by Giuseppe Verdi in his opera based on Don Álvaro, La forza del destino (1862). Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino is written in a combination of prose and verse. In the translation the latter has been rendered into prose, but the text is set in short lines (in approximate measure with the original) so that the reader will know when verse is used in the Spanish. I wish to thank Noël Valis, who read the entire first act and made many constructive suggestions; Joyce Tolliver, a scholar who always writes with exemplary clarity and ad- mirable acumen about nineteenth-century Spanish literature ; Minia Bongiorno García, who secured the slide of the Duke of Rivas from the Ateneo de Madrid; Orin Grossman , academic vice president of Fairfield University, who financially and humanistically supported the publication of this play; and my wife, Theresa, with whose patience and generosity of mind and heart I have been very abundantly blessed. T R A N S L AT O R ’ S P R E F A C E xi ...