The Spirit of the Chorus in D'Annunzio's La città morta

"Eros nella pugna invitto" (O Eros, invincible in strife) begins Gabriele D'Annunzio's tragic drama, La città morta (The Dead City, 1898).¹ These are the words that are being read to the blind Anna by Bianca Maria, the beautiful young woman who holds the important position of being the play's primary object of desire. They are the same words that form the play's epigraph, a line from Sophocles' Antigone. The result of such literary admixture is convergence. An attempt is made to invoke the spirit of Antigone in the figure of Bianca Maria, to bring together ancient and modern heroine. But the reference also enacts a more complicated convergence, for these are not the words of Antigone but those of Sophocles' chorus. Concerning these opening lines, it has been said that

The space of modern tragedy is an empty zone where only traces of the ancient clamor of the chorus remain. In this space, the chorus can be expressed only in a quotation ... the lone voice of a woman who reads from a book.²

This article examines what constitutes these "traces of the ancient clamor of the chorus," focusing its attention on the "clamor" of classical tragedy. For D'Annunzio, whose interest in Attic drama was whetted by his trip in 1895 to see Schliemann's excavations of Mycenae, it was the clamorous aspect of Greek drama that best represented its genius. La città morta represents his first attempt to incorporate the ancient spirit, as he saw it, into a modern tragedy.³ One cannot bring up the clamor of classic tragedy without thinking of the chorus, whose presence first and foremost separates classic and modern drama, at least superficially. To solve the problem of how to incorporate a chorus into a drama of fin-de-siècle Europe, D'Annunzio looked to the diva and to what she could accomplish onstage. The result is a chorus of one. She is Anna, the blind older woman married to Alessandro, the man who is in love with the younger Bianca Maria, who is in turn incestuously desired by her brother Leonardo. She is the figure around which this mangled love story congregates, but she is also D'Annunzio's modern chorus, the conduit through which the characters are presented to a modern audience.

It has been said that the figure in which the most precise psychology of ancient dramaturgy is maintained, the one who represents most evidently the new theatrical vision of D'Annunzio, is that of Anna.⁴ Her role was written specifically for the great actresses who dominated European theater in the last decade of the nineteenth century, first brought to the stage by Sarah Bernhardt in the French production and then by Eleonora Duse in the original Italian production. As the blind woman from whom nothing can be hidden, she is both Tiresias and Cassandra. Bianca Maria says of her, "Ella sa tutto, ella comprende tutto. Non è possible nascondere" (60) (She knows everything, she understands everything. It is not possible to conceal; 122). Anna's importance to the whole rests on the duality of her position within the play. As both seer and choral figure, she acts as a type of lynchpin that holds the drama together.

D'Annunzio conceived of Anna's role in his play in light of ideas concerning how the chorus functions in Attic drama. The difficulty of assessing this indebtedness derives from the singularity of each classical chorus and its varying roles to each particular tragedy. La città morta may begin with a reference to Antigone, but Anna's role as blind prophetess, as part Tiresias and part Cassandra, also brings to mind, among other things, Oedipus Tyrannus and Agamemnon. Thus it is less these specific works than an idea of classical tragedy that inflects La città morta. D'Annunzio announces his influences in the first documented reference to the play we have, a letter from 1895. He writes: "At Mycenae I reread Sophocles and Aeschylus, under the Gate of the Lions. The form of my drama is already clear...