March 21, 1901: La Città Morta (The Dead City) premieres at Teatro della Canobbiana, in Milan, Italy. Set in the ruins of Mycenae, in ancient Greece, it explores themes of love, jealousy, obsession, and the clash between past and present. The plot follows characters entangled in a web of passion and despair as they confront their inner demons and the ghosts of history.
The play was written by Gabriele D'Annunzio. It's been said that there is a fine line between genius and madness. D'Annunzio pissed on that line.
Gabriele D'Annunzio
Born in 1863 in Pescara, Italy, he was a poet, a playwright, an orator, a journalist, an aristocrat, and an officer in the Royal Italian Army during World War I. He was considered one of the greatest novelists of his time, but he was also one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism, as he was an early supporter of dictator Benito Mussolini.
In 1894, he began an affair with actress Eleonora Duse. Born in 1858 outside Pavia, she was considered the greatest Italian actress of her era. She achieved a unique power of conviction and verity on the stage through intense absorption in the character, "eliminating the self" as she put it, and letting the qualities emerge from within, not imposed through artifice.
But there was an even greater actress at the time, from France: "The Divine Sarah." Sarah Bernhardt was born in 1844 in Paris, and by the 1870s was already touring everywhere that she was beloved, which was basically any country that had a stage.
No less than Edmond Rostand, author of the 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture." Victor Hugo, author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables, wrote a play based on the Spanish legend Ruy Blas, and demanded that she be cast in it, citing her "golden voice."
Sarah Bernhardt
d'Annunzio wrote 4 plays for Duse to star in. But when he cast Bernhardt in La Città Morta, she was furious, and ended the affair. Not to be outdone, he wrote a novel, Il Fuoco (The Flame). Finishing it, he gave her a copy. It contained intimate details about their affair. Very intimate details, including details about her body that only a bed-partner could know. She got furious all over again, and demanded that he burn his original manuscript.
He said he had to publish it, because he was broke. He said he would burn it if she would give him the same amount of money that he said he was getting as an advance. She went on tour, including in America, to great success, made the money, and gave it to him. He told her he burned the original manuscript. He lied: It was published, anyway.
This led George Seldes, the American journalist who covered Mussolini in his early days as Italy's dictator -- and got chased out and nearly killed for his criticisms, to call D'Annunzio one of "the three SOBs" he had covered in a career that lasted through every decade of the 20th Century. (Seldes survived Il Duce's attempt to have him killed, and lived to be 104.) Seldes wrote, "Treason is treason, to a person as well as to an idea. Many a man has betrayed a person or country for a cause he felt just. This man merely doubled his money." (Seldes' other two "SOBs" were actor Errol Flynn and broadcaster Fulton Lewis Jr. -- also for their frauds.)
Bernhardt died in 1923, Duse in 1924, both still beloved. Which was greater? The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who saw both actresses in London within the span of a few days, in the same play, gave his nod to Duse. English actress Ellen Terry, a contemporary who knew them both, observed, "How futile it is to make comparisons! Better far to thank heaven for both these women."
d'Annunzio lived to see Italy's rise under Mussolini, but not its fall under him, dying in 1938, and has mostly been forgotten outside his home country. Which may be what he deserves.
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March 21, 1901 was a Thursday. The only major professional sport in North America at the time was baseball, and it was then in Spring Training. Hockey's Stanley Cup had been awarded the previous month, to the Winnipeg Victorias. But there were no scores that counted on this day.
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