Luigi Illica

Luigi Illica, born at Castell’Arquato on 9th May 1857; died at Colombarone near Castell'Arquato 16th December 1919.	Luigi Illica Journalist, dramatist, the librettist and accomplished poet, Luigi Illica is one of the leading figures of the Milanese “Scapigliatura” avant-garde movement. Influenced perhaps by his father, a public notary who was tended towards radical republicanism, as a boy he demonstrated a rebellious and passionate temperament. He obtained poor results at the local grammar school in Piacenza and his time spent at college near Cremona was no more profitable. At about the age of about 20 he left the Piacenza area and spent four years in a roving life at sea, during which he took part in the Battle of Pleven in 1877 during the war between Russia and Turkey. In 1879 he went to live in Milan where he initially found work with the literary journal of his cousin Carlo Muscaretti.
He became a journalist for the newspaper Corriere della Sera and soon afterwards left Milan from Bologna where with Luigi Lodi e Giuseppe Barbanti-Brodano he founded a radical journal called Don Chisciotte, which was close to the ideas of di Giosuè Carducci. The newspaper was suspended when Illica and Lodi took part in the anti-French demonstrations of the period and were brought before the law courts in Bologna. In this period Illica also took part in a duel in which he lost part of his left ear: his second for the duel was Carducci. As early as 1875 Illica had made his debut at theatre in his home time with a one-act piece called Hassan. In 1882 after his return from Bologna to Milan he published Intermezzi drammatici under the pseudonym Luigi della Scorziana, a collection of sketches and prose pieces, which criticize, in a satirical way, the author's, actors and critics whom Illica considered out of date and old-hat. As a theatrical author he enjoyed an immediate success with I Narbonnerie La Tour (1883), but the work which became his greatest claim to fame was L'eredita del Felis (1891), a work in Milanese dialect influenced by same of the themes Ibsen also treated.
	From 1889 onwards Luigi Illica flanked his activities as a theatre writer with that of opera librettist this new activity was the beginning of an intense period in his life. His growing success was crowned in 1891 when he entered the Ricordi publishing company and in this initial period he intervened in a resolute of way on the tormented the text of Manon Lescaut, which had passed through the hands of many different authors without ever satisfying the dramatic needs of the young Puccini. This was the beginning of Illica’s most important creative collaboration. He was expert in creating visual situations and dramatic structures that liberated the fantasy of the Lucchese composer and although his collaboration with Puccini was always conflict riven, it was mitigated by the presence of the calm, patient, elegant poet Giuseppe Giacosa. Thus Puccini's three greatest masterpieces were born: La bohème in 1896, Tosca in 1900 and Madama Butterfly in 1904.
The opera written solely by Illica which enjoyed the greatest success was Andrea Chènier, created for composer Umberto Giordano and first staged in 1896. Between 1892 and 1911 Illica wrote more than 30 opera librettos for the greatest musicians of the age, amongst which we should remember La Wally by Catalani (1892), Cristoforo Colombo (1892) and Germania (1902) for Franchetti, Siberia (1903) for Giordano, Iris (1898), Le Maschere (1901) and Isabeau (1911) for Mascagni and the recently recorded Cassandra (1905) for Vittorio Gnecchi Ruscone. With the passing of time and the birth of the cinema epic Illica’s continuously up-dated his dramatic vision and his librettos became more and more like a film script, rich in commentary and visual descriptions of the scenes that take place. A man of fierce temperament, the Great War unleashed Illica’s patriotic enthusiasm and he attacked the indifferent pacifism of his old friend Puccini. In 1915 at the age of 58 he left for the front, signing up as a volunteer in the Army, fighting as a corporal in an artillery battery from Piacenza. The following year he suffered a serious fall from a horse, which forced him to return definitively to Colombarone, a country property near Castell’Arquato where he died on 16 December 1919.