Stage Sisters: Gemma Bellincioni's Violetta and Eleonora Duse's Margherita
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Stage Sisters: Gemma Bellincioni’s Violetta and Eleonora
Duse’s Margherita
Annamaria Cecconi, Hero Lotti
Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Volume 19, 2015, pp.
54-61 (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2015.0009
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/592116
Access provided at 31 Mar 2020 08:03 GMT with no institutional affiliationStage Sisters
Gemma Bellincioni’s Violetta and
Eleonora Duse’s Margherita
Annamaria Cecconi
translated by hero lotti
Gemma Bellincioni, the “Duse of Opera”
In October 1892, just months after Eleonora Duse’s success in La Dame aux
Camélias, Cavalleria Rusticana also opened in Vienna. The enthusiastic audi-
ence coined the sobriquet “Duse of Opera” for the singer Gemma Bellincioni,
a tribute to her excellence in musical and acting performance. In the late nine-
teenth century a new generation of Italian actors, the so-called grande attore,
moved toward their own dramaturgy, manipulating characters according to
their perception and the anti-Romantic naturalistic canon. The result was a
creative performance that rewrote the text by means of their authorial voice.1
Thus the player became de facto a “proto-director,” though the professional di-
rector did not emerge until the twentieth century. In this article I use conceptual
strategies adopted in current Italian feminist studies on actresses to study op-
era singers, thus moving from theatrology to gender musicology.2 Investigating
the relationship between the performers of the two stages, theater and opera,
opens new perspectives and in particular gives a more complex definition of
the abused classification singing actress, so often ascribed to singers with out-
standing acting abilities. In the case of Bellincioni, we could better use Rodolfo
Celletti’s definition vocal actress.3
1 Gigi Livio, “Il teatro del grande attore e del mattatore,” in Storia del teatro moderno e contem-
poraneo, series editors, Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 2:611–76.
See also Mirella Schino, Il teatro di Eleonora Duse (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 106.
2 Laura Mariani, Sarah Bernhardt, Colette e l’arte del travestimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996),
7–21; Annamaria Cecconi and Roberta Gandolfi, eds., “Dossier Teatro e Gender: L’approccio biograf-
ico,” Teatro e Storia, anno XXI, vol. 28 (2007): 329–406.
3 See Rodolfo Celletti, La grana della voce: Opere, direttori e cantanti (Milan: Baldini e Castoldi,
2000), 168. For the singer’s outstanding acting abilities, see Jarro [Giulio Piccini], “Gemma Bell-Today, 150 years after her birth, there are no monographs or recent stud-
ies on Gemma Bellincioni (1864–1950), a great international diva.4 Bellincioni
occupies an important place in the history of female opera singers as the favorite
diva of Verismo composers (Mascagni, Giordano, Tasca, Smareglia). She was
an artist who steered her career in a deliberate and modern fashion, attentive to
the evolution of the opera business and incessantly searching for new characters
and new artistic experiences, including cinematic direction. Bellincioni deserv-
edly belongs to the star system of the period, as the novel, Vittorina, probably
written by a ghost writer to exploit her fame, shows.5 At forty years of age she
boldly concluded her career in the role of Strauss’s first Italian Salome.
The actress Adelaide Ristori (1822–1906) had been largely inspired by
opera heroines in the choice of her repertoire; however, at the end of the centu-
ry, the arrival of stage personalities such as Duse and Bernhardt reversed such
influence, moving the most receptive opera singers to personify the singing ac-
tress. A list of the roles Bellincioni premiered places her in direct contact with
the repertoire of the young Duse. However, there is no evidence (so far) of a
personal relationship between the two divas, not even through the poet Gabri-
ele D’Annunzio, Duse’s lover, who probably also had a love affair with the cele-
brated singer in June 1903 and with her daughter Bianca in 1921.6 In the words
of Teresa Sormanni Rasi, a theater guest of Duse, there had been one meeting
around 1892 or 1893: “We received this telegram: ‘I have a magnificent box for
the magnificent Bellincioni.’ The two ladies presented each other with flowers.”7
The Saddened Camellias
Traviata was Bellincioni’s recognized pièce de résistance. The renown of her
interpretation led Sarah Bernhardt in Paris in 1900 to alternate between per-
formances of Sarah/Marguerite and Gemma/Violetta, further confirmation that
the singer ought to be included as the third figure of a triad comprising the most
incioni,” in Attori, cantanti, concertisti ed acrobati (Florence: Bemporard, 1898), 170; Angelo Sguerzi,
Le stirpi canore (Bologna: Bongiovanni, 1978), 54–57.
4 The main sources are Gemma Bellincioni, Io e il palcoscenico: Trenta e uno anni di vita artistica
(Milan: R. Quintieri, 1920); the biography written by her daughter, Bianca Stagno Bellincioni, Ro-
berto Stagno e Gemma Bellincioni intimi (Florence: Monsalvato, 1943); Giovanni Battista Baccioni,
Gemma Bellincioni: Biografia aneddotica (Palermo: Salvatore Biondo, 1902); Guido Chigi Saracini,
Ricordanze, with notes and illustrations by O. Rudge (Siena: Tucci, 1958), 24–29; Eugenio Gara,
“Giardino del bel canto: Gemma Bellincioni,” La Scala: Rivista dell’Opera 40 (March 1953): 29–34;
Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera: 1815–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006). I have so far gathered a small number of her letters.
5 Vittorina (Florence: Galletti e Cocchi, 1895).
6 See Lara Sonja Uras, “D’Annunzio e i musicisti italiani: Scambi epistolari,” in D’Annunzio
musico imaginifico, ed. Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, Fiamma Nicolodi, and Cesare Orselli (Florence:
Olschki, 2008), 69–85. The poet wrote twenty years later: “I send you a rare perfume: the tender smell
of Friendship.” See Gabriele D’Annunzio to Gemma Bellincioni, September 29, 1929, ca2165/1–4,
Biblioteca Teatrale “Livia Simoni,” Archivio Museo Teatrale alla Scala, Milan.
7 See Camillo Antona Traversi, Eleonora Duse: Sua vita, sua gloria, suo martirio (Pisa: Succ. Nistri
Editori, 1926), 416.
Cecconi, Stage Sisters 55celebrated interpreters of the Dumasian role.8 Recent publications by Simona
Brunetti and Donatella Orecchia, who have analyzed Duse’s interpretation of La
signora dalle camelie, allow us to narrow the comparison to the two artists Duse
and Bellincioni. In what measure was Bellincioni’s Violetta, highly acclaimed by
European and Latin American audiences for three decades from the 1890s to
the 1920s, indebted to Duse’s Margherita?9 And since Italian audiences found
“Violetta’s camellias saddened” over the course of the singer’s career, can we
note an analogous evolution in the actress’s portrayal of the Dumasian heroine?10
I intend to reconstruct the vocal and gestural performances of the singer
at the Italian productions for which I have been able to trace documentary
evidence. I believe that Bellincioni was aware of the importance of acting to op-
eratic innovation at the turn of the century and deliberately chose between Duse
and Bernhardt, thus anticipating the fully fledged veristic sensibility of the op-
eratic repertoire for which she would become the main interpreter. The impact
of the encounter with Giovanni Emanuel in the first years of her career should
not be underestimated; the innovator and theoretician likewise influenced the
young Duse.11 These observations, written by the singer and unfortunately un-
dated, take us to the heart of my comparison:
To move the public without too much commotion and needless tears (given the
mild and resigned character of Alfredo’s sweet lover) is not an easy thing to achieve
in all its moving psychology; and when we then consider that one has to die of tu-
berculosis issuing forth As and Bflats, the matter becomes even more complicated,
don’t you think? . . . [And, quoting her meeting with Verdi,] “I want to be as close
as possible to the truth [emphasis in the original] of every man who loves, and of
every woman who suffers from love, of my times.”12
Verdi wrote to Bellincioni in 1899 apropos of Traviata: “I congratulate
you for your ability to give life and splendour to the old sinner.”13 In the last
decades of the century, interest in the work dwindled, while critics concentrated
8 See “Current Topics in Rome; Italy’s Great Prima Donna to Visit the Paris Fair Will Be Bern-
hardt’s Guest,” in Foreign Correspondence, New York Times, January 21, 1900.
9 I use Margherita to refer to Duse’s creation of the role and Marguerite for Dumas’s character.
See Simona Brunetti, Il palcoscenico del secondo ottocento italiano: “La signora dalle camelie” (Pad-
ua: Esedra, 2004); and Donatella Orecchia, La prima Duse: Nascita di un’attrice moderna (Rome:
Artemide, 2007), 61–64.
10 The biting definition is that of Gino Monaldi, Cantanti celebri del XIX secolo (Rome: Nuova
antologia, n.d.), 219.
11 The singer describes how she made friends with Giovanni Emanuel’s theater company in 1887.
See Bellincioni, Io e il palcoscenico, 73.
12 Gemma Bellincioni, Traviata, Archivio autografi. ms 2245, 1, 4, Civico Museo Teatrale
“Carlo Schmidl,” Trieste.
13 Giuseppe Verdi to Gemma Bellincioni, November 7, 1899, autografi 5898, Biblioteca Te-
atrale “Livia Simoni,” Archivio Museo Teatrale alla Scala, Milan. A similar comment on Bellincioni’s
“new youth and beauty” and glamorous toilettes in Traviata (Rome, March 10, 1894) is expressed
in Il popolo romano, quoted in Mario Rinaldi, Due secoli di musica al Teatro Argentina (Florence:
Olschki, 1978), 2:1220–21.
56 Women & Music Volume 19on distinguishing between the double performance of the singer and the actress in
the leading role.14 This new “life and splendour” can be traced to the sensational
Traviata at the Teatro Argentina in 1890; it would fix Bellincioni as an iconic
Violetta par excellence at the turn of the century.15 According to Gino Monaldi,
The fanaticism inspired by Bellincioni cannot be described—it seemed that no one
had ever seen or heard Violetta, so different from the others was she who appeared
on the stage. . . . There’s no need to debate whether the singer was always at one
with the actress and whether the first left something to be desired in her execution
or the second went too far sometimes in striving for certain theatrical and vocal
effects; it is certain that her evocative power was extraordinary.16
Violetta and Margherita
It is not easy to reconstruct the gestures of Bellincioni’s performance, since con-
temporary critics privileged the emotional impact on the audience. An anony-
mous critic commented upon a Bologna Traviata using language that echoed
reviews of Duse: “Before that face, that voice and those eyes that laugh, that
reflect, that weep such that I had never yet seen on the opera stage, analysis is
rendered impossible.”17 Thanks to a Verdian anecdote, however, comparison
can be made between the performances of Duse and Bellincioni in the famous
scene where Alfredo insults Violetta, throwing a purse of money in her lap.
Outstanding among the “theatrical effects” of Bellincioni’s performance was
her falling to the ground under the weight of the youth’s insults, replacing the
stage direction to faint in Flora’s and the doctor’s arms.18 Duse, conversely, drew
back to the sofa and reiterated the name of her beloved no fewer than eight
times, varying her accents and tone—an ability that highly impressed critics and
14 “Many thought the choice of this intimate musical drama inopportune, and not only because
of the many productions that had been staged in the space of a few years . . . but above all because the
role of Violetta requires an interpretation of a superior order. . . . She [Bellincioni] had studied carefully
how to render the final scene and she succeeded perfectly. She discovered truly harrowing accents in
that painful episode of her death, and her acting was irreproachable and effective” (“Gazzettino di
Trieste,” in L’Arte: Rassegna di teatri belle arti e letteratura 16, no. 2 [1885]: 2).
15 “She knows how to sing, how to speak, how to move, how to behave, she listens and knows
how to make herself heard” (G. A. Biagi, La Nazione, November 20, 1889, quoted in Stagno Bell-
incioni, Roberto Stagno e Gemma Bellincioni intimi, 43). “Bellincioni gives a refined interpretation of
the character of Violetta. She is equally admirable as a singer and as an actress. . . . [I]t is unnecessary
to mention that the audience gave expression to their most lively appreciation” (Gazzetta musicale di
Milano, March 5, 1890).
16 Gino Monaldi, I miei ricordi musicali (Rome: Ausonia, 1921), 104–9. The reviewer of Il Po-
polo Romano too was emphatic in describing the Traviata of 1892: “Artistic sensations of pure and
veritable heavenliness” (quoted in Stagno Bellincioni, Roberto Stagno e Gemma Bellincioni intimi,
47). She was to have the same outstanding success in Rome in 1894.
17 See Baccioni, Gemma Bellincioni, 21.
18 The singer in her memoirs attributes to chance the genesis of her most celebrated scene: “I fell
stiffly backwards in such a realistic way that the audience burst into an irrepressible ovation!” and
then decided to keep it (Bellincioni, Io e il palcoscenico, 62–63).
Cecconi, Stage Sisters 57probably Verdi, as Luigi Rasi reports: ‘That little Duse!’ Verdi once said. ‘Had I
heard her before writing Traviata, what a fine ending I might have put together
with that crescendo of Armando that she came up with, simply letting her soul
brim forth!’”19
It is worth pausing to discuss the actress’s “crescendo of Armando” and
the singer’s fall. These two interpretive choices, that is, whether to underplay
the prostration of the insulted Violetta/Margherita or to use the expressive
power of the body to overplay the scene, demonstrate the theatrical resolution
that two different dramatic codes offer. In Dumas’s 1855 text and Luigi Tetto-
ni’s Italian version, most often adopted in Italy in the nineteenth century, the
stage directions specify “shouting and falling backward.”20 Giacinta Pezzana
(1841–1919), whose style greatly influenced Duse’s, surprised her audience with
a scream of indignation. Arman Schwartz underlines the difficulty of effectively
staging this scene. The metaphorical unmasking of Violetta’s body—a commod-
ity marked by means of Alfredo’s throwing her a silk purse—is too weak with
respect to the old melodramatic code to show a bodily sign of guilt.21 Could we
suppose that Bellincioni, with a dramatist’s insightfulness, overcame this void
by means of an autonomous authorial choice?
Bellincioni is bound vocally to the musical text, to the voice that anoth-
er, the composer, has preordained: she has very little room for maneuvering;
she can only appropriate the gesture, emphasize the body with an excessive
movement (the fall) to burst unexpectedly into the unreality and hyperbole of
the code of opera singing. She finds an extramusical gesture that enables her to
create a new climax and to change the segmentation and the direction of the
operatic text. Her fall becomes an involuntary reaction to events, expressing
and revealing the internal upheaval of the character. The performative move
“against” the prescriptions of the text can appear as though generated by a
mental prostration. Conversely, as indicated by contemporary reviewers, Bell-
incioni represented the final death of Violetta with fundamental composure.
Bellincioni strove to remove the gestural emphasis from the traditional morir
cantando (singing death), in which the expressive power of gesture is inevitably
19 Luigi Rasi, La Duse (Rome: Bulzoni, 1986), 63–64. Rasi’s source was probably Joseph Comte
Primoli, “La Duse,” Revue de Paris, June 1897, quoted in Emil Alphons Rheinhardt, Eleonora Duse
(Milan: Mondadori, 1931), 149. On Primoli as Duse’s mythographer, see Paola Bertolone, “Deus”: Il
carteggio tra Eleonora Duse e il conte Primoli, in Voci e anime, corpi e scritture: Atti del Convegno
internazionale su Eleonora Duse, ed. Maria Ida Biggi and Paolo Puppa (Rome: Bulzoni, 2009), 97–
110. Orecchia claims that an Edison recording of Duse’s piece has been lost.
20 Alexandre Dumas fils, La dame aux camélias, pièce en 5 actes, mêlée de chants (Paris: Giraud
et Dagneau, 1852), act 4, scene 6, 93–94; and Dumas fils, La signora delle camelie, dramma in cinque
atti, libera versione di Luigi Enrico Tettoni, in Florilegio Drammatico ovvero scelto repertorio mod-
erno di componimenti teatrali italiani e stranieri, ed. Pietro Manzoni (Milan: Borroni e Scotti, 1852),
act 4, scene 6, 65. From the reprint onward, the title was spelled La signora dalle camelie. For two
opposite opinions on Tettoni as the source of Piave’s libretto, see Emilio Sala, Il valzer delle camelie:
Echi di Parigi nella “Traviata” (Turin: edt, 2008), n. 50; and Brunetti, Il palcoscenico del secondo
ottocento italiano, 122.
21 Arman Schwartz, “Modernity Sings: Rethinking Realism in Italian Opera” (PhD diss., Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, 2009), 43–44.
58 Women & Music Volume 19weakened, since it simply confirms what has already occurred in the music and
in the singing.
Duse, in contrast, is free to pause, to modify her timing and tone at will,
free also to shift her interpretation predominantly to the level of the vocal code,
making an artistic choice that Molinari interprets as an “abandonment of vocal
stereotypes . . . of the virtuoso exercise intended to embellish diction, to draw it
closer in certain particularly intense moments, to song.”22 I am suggesting a de-
liberate artistic exchange: the crossing between two codes of reference or, better,
the chiasmus between the gestural performativity of singers and the musicality
of actresses, perhaps the most interesting characteristic with which to explore
the relationship between actresses and singers at the turn of the century.
Rastignac foregrounds Bellincioni’s research into naturalistic effects:
From close up the quiet bustle of the artist, who does not lose concentration,
digress, or forget, is nothing short of extraordinary. . . . [S]he is in love, she is dis-
tressed, it is almost as though the love and the illness are organic, when she does
not sing she complains, and exclaims anguished words that the audience cannot
hear or grasp, but those sitting in the forestage boxes hear and grasp perfectly.23
We might conjecture that in this respect Bellincioni had learned from Duse’s
microscenes, from the actress’s new dramaturgy, since the singer too learned to
use those “little groans, little gestures, fits, . . . a bewildered expression, sighs,
swoons: that genius of neurasthenia” that Romain Rolland noted in Duse/
Margherita in Zurich in 1899.24 It seems that Bellincioni aimed to cross the
boundaries between opera and prose and shaped for herself an autonomous or
authorial creative space, distancing herself from the theatrical-musical text. At
the end of the century, by virtue of the changes in women’s lives and roles in the
world of public opinion, the text that Verdi and Piave had conceived for their
heroine did not suffice to give Violetta dramatic credibility or, above all, to win
the female audience members’ empathy. Bellincioni’s disjointed sounds, emitted
at the forestage, are signs of the same distance from Dumas that Duse had
staged with her unique “vocal score.” In this sense it seems that Bellincioni’s Vi-
oletta marks an important turning point in the history of gestural interpretation
by opera divas—a history that largely remains to be written.
22 Cesare Molinari, L’attrice divina: Eleonora Duse nel teatro italiano tra i due secoli, 2nd ed.
(Rome: Bulzoni, 1987), 97. On Duse’s vocal innovations, see Valentina Valentini, “La voce scomparsa:
La recitazione vocale di Eleonora Duse nelle tragedie di Gabriele D’Annunzio,” in Dal Magdalena
Project al Magfest, ed. Giulia Palladini (Rome: Editoria & Spettacolo, 2012), 33–49.
23 Rastignac [Vincenzo Morello], “Nell’arte e nella vita: Gemma Bellincioni,” Tribuna, May 25,
1898, quoted in Stagno Bellincioni, Roberto Stagno e Gemma Bellincioni intimi, 101. His views make
reference to a review of Achille Torelli’s Scrollina in Il pungolo, discussed by Orecchia, La prima
Duse, 123.
24 Quoted by William Weaver, Eleonora Duse (Milan: Bompiani, 1985), 218–19. For Duse’s high-
ly strung acting style, see Donatella Orecchia, “Appunti sull’immaginario dei nervi e il corpo scenico
ottocentesco,” Arabeschi 1 (January–June 2013), http://www.arabeschi.it/uploads/pdf/Numero-3.pdf.
Cecconi, Stage Sisters 59In 1898 Rastignac made an interesting point, drawing together the tri-
ad Bernhardt, Duse, and Bellincioni: he criticized the transformations that the
prose actresses had worked upon Marguerite Gautier, turning her into a “sym-
bolic” character, preferring Bellincioni’s Violetta, where “the word weeps, the
note sobs”:
Sarah Bernhardt dies walking in a circle and falling at the foot of the bed like
a circus gladiator. Eleonora Duse tells the story of her life as a melody, blend-
ing marvelously—it is true—all the passages into one, with a uniform gray tint,
. . . rendering poor service to the victim of misfortune, who, had she been as able
to speak as our great actress, would certainly have written books and given con-
ferences on social propaganda. Gemma Bellincioni, on the other hand, restores to
Dumas’s creation her primitive human essence, and her characteristics, her pas-
sion. And let it not be said that the credit for all this lies with the music . . . for
Dumas’s prose does not warrant that any such liberty be taken on the part of those
who have to interpret it.25
These statements reveal that music criticism was out of sync with theater
criticism; hence the difficulty in accepting that Duse’s dramaturgy—which was
then heading, via Henrik Ibsen, in a completely different direction—might be
embraced by the musical theater. Modernization was accepted only as far as a
character who was beginning to seem out of date was concerned. Where such
modernization was modeled upon “cerebral or pseudocerebral acting,” thus
crossing the boundary of naturalistic re-creation even in its veristic forms, there
was an unwillingness to accept and understand the meaning of the new repre-
sentation of women.26 The fear of the New Eve was just around the corner.27
The necessity for a “reinvigoration” and “rejuvenation” of La Dame aux
Camélias—“a lady in her fifties,” as Rasi pointed out in his praise of the anti-
Romantic withdrawal of Duse’s Margherita—was noted by critics of the two
stages.28 In 1906, in Duse’s opinion, La Dame aux Camélias was a “love [that
was] over, finished.”29 That same year Bellincioni wrote to Carlo D’Ormeville,
declining to sing Violetta in Turin for the third time in her career: “The thing
would have been too prosaic for me . . . to end up as the eternal little old woman
[emphasis in the text], still sprightly it is true, but frankly no longer inspiring
any poetry in me.”30
25 Rastignac, Nell’arte e nella vita, 102–3.
26 Rastignac, Nell’arte e nella vita, 102.
27 See Anne-Lise Maure, “‘Nuova Eva e vecchio Adamo’: Identità sessuali in crisi,” in Storia
delle donne in Occidente: L’ottocento, ed. Duby Georged and Perrot Michelle (Bari: Laterza, 1991),
524–43.
28 Rasi, La Duse, 55 and ff.; see also Michele Uda, “Le due maniere di Eleonora Duse,” in Il
teatro italiano: La commedia e il dramma borghese dell’ottocento, ed. Siro. Ferrone, various trans.
(Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 419–23.
29 See Gerardo Guerrieri, Eleonora Duse: Nove saggi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993), 91.
30 Gemma Bellincioni to Carlo D’Ormeville, September 1, 1906[?], coll. Casati 78, Biblioteca
60 Women & Music Volume 19The earliest indications of this distance from Verdi’s opera are discernible
in an interview that Bellincioni gave to Roberto Bracco in 1902 on the occasion
of her impromptu début as Marguerite Gautier for Rasi’s Scuola di Recitazione
di Firenze. Bracco, who had attended Duse’s début in Dumas’s play in Paris
years before, led the conversation to the problems of the dual interpretation
of Marguerite and Violetta and posed very acute questions. It is interesting to
dwell for a moment on one of Bellincioni’s assertions relating to the difficulties
that the prose posed for an opera singer. In Dumas’s play the encounter with
Duval senior left her doubtful:
It disturbs me a bit in some parts in which Dumas’s play seems to me a little bit
[less] true and [less] sincere. . . . It would be the most logical thing in the world for
Marguerite to send that tiresome person to the devil. And here my woman’s way of
thinking acts as a distraction. I no longer feel fully involved in the scene. . . . I ask
myself: “Why is it that it is alright in music but not in prose?”31
The search for a new artistic subjectivity led Bellincioni to acknowledging
Duse’s novelty, working against the precepts of theatrical-musical communica-
tion during her time. Bellincioni responded on various levels: as an emancipated
woman of the new century confronted with Violetta’s inevitably outdated sac-
rifice; as a singer aware of the irreversible crisis of the melodramatic code; and
finally as grande attrice. A modern interpreter who perfectly grasped Duse’s
lesson, Bellincioni measured herself against the character in order to give it new
dramatic life and to reactivate audience empathy.
Acknowledgments
A previous version of this article, “Una Violetta moderna con lo sguardo verso
Margherita: Gemma Bellincioni ed Eleonora Duse,” was published in Italian in
Voci e anime, corpi e scritture: Atti del Convegno internazionale su Eleonora
Duse, ed. Maria Ida Biggi and Paolo Puppa (Rome: Bulzoni, 2009), 481–94.
My thanks go to Simona Brunetti and Donatella Orecchia for their cour-
tesy and to Maria Amalia D’Aronco for her invaluable support.
Teatrale “Livia Simoni,” Milan; Eleonora Duse to Rastignac, quoted in Molinari, L’attrice Divina, 74.
See also her letter to Arrigo Boito, April 9, 1897, in Eleonora Duse and Arrigo Boito, Lettere d’amore,
ed. Raul Radice (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1979), 907.
31 Roberto Bracco, “Intervista con Gemma Bellincioni,” Corriere di Napoli, May 9, 1902, quoted
in Stagno Bellincioni, Roberto Stagno e Gemma Bellincioni intimi, 130–31.
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