Arrigo Boito librettista : un'indagine linguistica tra testo poetico e testo musicale

This thesis focuses on Arrigo Boito as a librettist. It mainly considers his works from the linguistic point of view, but also investigates how the poetic style influenced the musical composition or, on the other side, if any poetic solution has been determined by the requirements of the composer (in this case Giuseppe Verdi or Boito himself). The first chapter presents an overview on the critical studies about Boito from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. The second chapter, based on the author’s public and private writings, reconstructs his aesthetic and artistic conception and purposes: music, opera, canon and linguistic problems are mainly examined. The third chapter presents Boito’s working methods as a librettist (also considering the relations with the composers he worked with), some philological observations about melodramatic texts, and then illustrates the sources, the genesis and the evolutions of the two analyzed librettos: Mefistofele and Falstaff. The next two chapters, the main part of the thesis, describe these operas through a linguistic examination between the poetic and the musical texts; so it isn’t a systematic list that groups similar phenomena (as syntax, morphology, lexicon): they are presented following the dramaturgic plot of Mefistofele and Falstaff. The sixth chapter summarizes the linguistic and stylistic features of the two operas; short conclusions end the thesis.