Clowning in Crisis: Reviving Commedia dell'Arte on the Operatic Stage, 1911-1926

Twentieth-century commedia dell’arte figures embodied powerful anxieties about the precarity of European life in a time plagued by destabilizing technological advancements, burgeoning nationalism, and the ever-evolving threat of modernity. My project traces commedia’s reemergence in works that cut across nation-states, artistic movements, and the First World War, including Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos (Vienna 1916), Ferruccio Busoni’s Arlecchino and Turandot (Zürich 1917), Igor Stravinsky, Léonide Massine, and Pablo Picasso’s Pulcinella (Paris 1920), and Giacomo Puccini, Renato Simoni, and Giuseppe Adami’s Turandot (Milan 1926). Through in-depth analyses of these works and their public reception within their social and political contexts, I argue that the specter of commedia dell’arte spoke to a milieu uniquely marked by crisis. Commedia dell’arte characters refracted a uniquely European past through fashionable mechanized aesthetics, modernist irony, and references to premodern urban centers that symbolized a disappearing way of life.

In a century of exile, references to commedia cobbled together and re-interpreted distant cultural memories. Commedia dell’arte was an abstraction of early modern philosophies interwoven with modern anxieties regarding the battling forces of culture (art) and civilization (politics). Its revival renegotiated hierarchies of power. These figures were visual reminders of a glorious cultural past, evolving signifiers in an increasingly technologized and politicized twentieth century, but they were also sites of modern refashioning— sites where the modern political subject was deconstructed and then rebuilt.