Metastasio e Calzabigi all'origine dei cori alfieriani. Note su Alfieri lettore della tradizione corale italiana

The article tries to read the development of the tragic Chorus along the history of Italian dramatic literature, with the purpose of pointing out the meaningful problems that an author such Vittorio Alfieri had to face in order to create his own choral character, doubled in a classical lyrical chorus (Mirra, Abele, Alceste Seconda) and a collective figure with a relevant political role – the “popolo” which appears in Virginia, Agide and in Bruto Primo. Aware, from one hand, of the previous solutions of Trissino’s Sofonisba, in which Chorus had a political function, and from the other of the sublime gravitas to which Tasso destined his Chorus, Alfieri looked in particular at the reflections of two contemporary dramatist : Metastasio and Calzabigi. If in his political “tragedie di libertà” Alfieri builds his Chorus on Metastasio’s considerations about the Aristotelian category of “likeliness”, the Chorus which comes out in his last tragedies seems to be drawn on Calzabigi’s Alceste. The presence of these two models in the structure of Alfieri’s Chorus confirms the progressive incidence of the music in his dramatic theory. Indeed, after Mirra, the alfierian choral character will have the task of gaining, through his lyrical song accompanied by music, a transcendent contact with the divinity.