[In the following excerpted introduction to his translations of Musset's historical tragedies, Sices briefly summarizes the contexts and content of Lorenzaccio and Andrea del Sarto.]

FILIPPO
Would you deny the history of the entire world? …
LORENZO
I don't deny history. I just wasn't there.

Lorenzaccio, V, 2

Alfred de Musset's literary work abounds in contradictions: his abiding reputation as one of the major French Romanticists, vs. his attack on the romantic æsthetic in the name of classical tradition, constitutes only the most pervasive of them. But another significant contradiction can be found in his historical tragedies. It is true that he managed to complete only two of them, quite early in his career; but one of those—Lorenzaccio—is probably the most successful and enduring of the entire genre, certainly the most frequently produced on the French and international stage.¹ Its ultimate message, however, is, paradoxically, the meaninglessness of history.

The major practitioners in France of Romantic historical drama—Ludovic Vitet, Alexandre Dumas père, Victor Hugo—had essentially a dual purpose: to bring the Romantic historical vision inspired notably by the example of Sir Walter Scott onto the stage as well as into the novel, and to create a serious new theater, capable of displacing from the stage of the Comédie-Française the traditional French “classical” tragedy, whose neo-Aristotelean rules, perfected by Corneille and Racine, had been brought forward into those times by numerous epigones. The Romantics' aim was a tribute to the importance of the official French theater in their day. The 1830 début of Hugo's Hernani in that temple of classicism, celebrated in Théophile Gautier's Les Jeunes-France and Albert Besnard's famous painting, and recounted ever afterward in French manuals of literary history, marked the triumph and perhaps the high-water mark in France of the Romantic movement. But Musset had a different end in view, particularly following the fiasco of his La Nuit vénitienne in performance at the Odéon later that same year. So when he wrote his two completed historical tragedies, Andrea del Sarto and Lorenzaccio, in 1832 and 1833, he did not have stage performance in mind: their inclusion in a volume entitled Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil, “An Armchair Show,” makes it clear that, at least for the moment, Musset was thinking in terms of an ideal stage, more flexible, more intimate, and in the final analysis more spectacular than anything then conceivable at the Comédie-Française or in the French theater in general. His imagination, both poetic and dramatic, was thus freed from the limitations of contemporary stage practice and resources. On the other hand, however, unlike a Shakespeare, a Racine or a Molière, he was not granted the possibility of seeing his plays take shape in their natural medium, of modifying them on the basis of their audiences' response, of developing his own dramatic instinct in the give-and-take of the theater. When the time came to produce Andrea del Sarto in 1848, those revolutionary days were not right for politically “irrelevant” drama, and Musset himself, who had lost the freshness of vision that led him to create his greatest plays in his early twenties, was tempted into modifications to suit the requirements of the “real” stage. As for Lorenzaccio, it was not to be mounted until 1896, almost forty years after the author's death, and even then in a severely altered version commissioned by Sarah Bernhardt as an addition to her list of travesty roles: the reduction from five to four acts, with a far smaller cast and the elimination of most subplots, denatured Musset's original dramaturgy.

Musset's conception of historical drama is situated somewhere between those of Ludovic Vitet's Scènes historiques,² which attempted to dramatize real historical events and thereby render them accessible to a broader public, and historical tragedies like Victor Hugo's Hernani and Ruy Blas, which used historical characters and events as a background for essentially fictional heroes. Andrea del Sarto, which, according to Musset's brother, Paul, was derived from “the abridged notices accompanying the engravings in the Musée Filhol,”³ takes the celebrated Italian renaissance painter as its artist-hero or anti-hero. Lorenzaccio, drawn from Benedetto Varchi's 16th-century chronicles, Storia fiorentina, via a historical sketch by George Sand, uses historical personages as its primary characters, although it interprets those characters, as well as the events they were involved in, according to Musset's own notion of history.

It is perhaps not surprising that two dramas written at such proximity in Musset's creative development, both drawn from events in the life of renaissance Florence, should share a common historical perspective, even though they are very different in scope and realization. Andrea del Sarto is about half Lorenzaccio's length and has proportionally even fewer characters; more importantly, it lacks the complexity of plot, characterization, and theme to be found in the latter play. Dealing with the artist as failure because of love, a common theme throughout Musset's work (its best example is perhaps to be found in the short story, “Le Fils du Titien”⁴), Andrea del Sarto tells the story of the artist's final days. Like Robert Browning's well-known poem dating from over a decade later, Musset's play takes its view of the painter, directly or indirectly, from the one propagated by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives: most notably that the artist squandered his talent and misused funds given him by the King of France because of excessive infatuation with his wife, Lucrezia del Bene, and a lack of will-power. Musset treats Lucrezia more sympathetically than does Browning, and invents a disciple and friend of the artist, Cordiani, who betrays him with Lucrezia and, at the end of the play, flees with her from Florence as news comes of Andrea's suicide (also invented by the Romantic Musset, in place of the artist's later premature death from the plague). Balancing this more sympathetic treatment of Lucrezia and her lover, Musset views Andrea as the survivor of a glorious generation—that of Leonardo, Michelangelo⁵ and Raphael—whose heroic example is giving way to the mannerists' petty imitations. In fact, modern scholarship has tended to see Andrea del Sarto as a master of the rising mannerist generation, rather than the morally and artistically decadent heir of earlier artists, and to emphasize the appreciation that he and his work benefitted from in contemporary Florence, not to mention Italy, France, and the rest of Europe, rather than the inglorious penury and oblivion alleged by Musset, in conformity with Vasari.

From the point of view of the twenty-two-year-old Musset, Andrea del Sarto's fortyish age at death must have seemed rather advanced, making Lucrezia's betrayal of him with a younger man understandable, if not forgivable. In any case, love and betrayal more often than not go together in the author's works. The conflict between love and artistic creation is another that informs a great number of those works, as well. Anticipation of failure became Musset's most characteristic literary theme; in fact, it extended even to the circumstances of his life. We cannot help remembering Flaubert's epistolary comment to Louise Colet, twenty years later: “Musset will have been a charming youth, and then an old man.”

Lorenzaccio, as I have said, is a far more complex work. Like Andrea del Sarto, it takes an historical figure as its protagonist; also like the earlier work, it treats history with considerable liberty in pursuit of its themes. But it is far less single-minded: apart from the increased number of characters—about thirty-five—and scenes—thirty-eight—in its five acts, involving a large number of different sets, it is marked by greater psychological complexity in its principal characters; its action, centering around the historically factual assassination of Duke Alexander de' Medici by his cousin, Lorenzo de' Medici, in 1536,⁶ is in reality a multiple, interwoven set of three main plots and several subordinate ones.⁷ The story of Lorenzaccio's⁸ conspiracy to murder his cousin, in order to restore a republican form of government, is mingled with two related plots (in both senses of the term): one by Filippo Strozzi and his family to avenge an insult made to his daughter, Luisa, and incidentally to restore the oligarchic form of republic that had formerly existed in Florence; and one by Ricciarda Cibo to win Duke Alexander over by her love to a more enlightened, less despotic and brutal form of rule. Through these various plots, which culminate, in the fourth act, in Lorenzo's murder of the Duke, followed by the inactivity on the part of the “republicans” that he had foreseen, are entwined the successful machinations of Cardinal Cibo, Ricciarda's brother-in-law, to maintain control over the city; the impotence of Florentine noblemen and churchmen in the face of Alexander's despotism and death, and of his succession by Pope Paul III's instrument, Cosimo de' Medici; the vain imprecations of Florentine exiles as they set out for life elsewhere; commentaries on all these events by two Florentine burghers, as well as by two poet-tutors who are willing to celebrate whatever form of government seems to be in power; the futile efforts of young students to reclaim their traditional political rights (this has been seen as a reflection of recent events in France, during the Revolution of 1830); and the fright of an idealistic young painter at the bloodthirsty language he hears Alexander and his bodyguard use as he is painting the Duke's portrait.⁹ The artist-as-hero was in vogue at that time—Balzac had published his Chef d'œuvre inconnu in 1831—but Musset's artists, in both Andrea del Sarto and Lorenzaccio, already express a broadly autumnal, disillusioned view. That Musset was deliberately “dedramatizing” his story, and emphasizing thereby the lack of political or moral significance of Lorenzo's act, is made clear at the end of the play, where he chooses to conclude his action with a disappointing, prosaic address, submissive to the real powers, translated almost verbatim from Varchi's chronicle, and spoken “in the distance” toward the populace massed offstage.

Musset's great historical drama, Lorenzaccio, can still speak eloquently to the modern reader or playgoer, beyond its important dramatic innovations, through its very contemporary themes: both the denial of historical meaningfulness that permeates it, expressed succinctly in the epigraph at the head of this introduction, and its political and psychological analysis of a city occupied by foreign forces, represented in the play by the German soldiers who hold the Citadel and control Florence in the name of the Emperor and the Pope. The latter may provide an explanation for both increased French interest in the play at the end of the second World War and its choice for a major production by the Za Branou Theater of Prague following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks in 1968. Although the play offers little hope of meaningful political action in the face of despotism, it is one artist's moving representation of and response to tyranny, and its “unheroic” hero possesses thereby a certain tragic grandeur in the face of power and men's willingness to bow to it.

Lorenzaccio thus goes well beyond Musset's elegiac vision of the artist in society in Andrea del Sarto. The two historical dramas taken together, however, represent a considerable artistic achievement, particularly on the part of so young an author, and deserve to be better known outside the linguistic borders of their nation ….

Notes

1. As for Andrea del Sarto, it has been set to music by the composer Daniel-Lesur, first (in 1947) as incidental music, then as a symphonic poem and finally as a lyric drama, premiered by the Marseilles Opera in 1969.

2. Paul Dimoff analyzed Lorenzaccio's debt to the unfinished scène historique of Musset's lover, George Sand, “Une Conspiration en 1537,” in La Genèse de Lorenzaccio, Paris, 1964.

3. See Paul de Musset, Biographie d'Alfred de Musset, in Musset, Œuvres complètes, Paris, 1963, p. 28.

4. First published in Revue des deux mondes, 15 May 1838, then collected in Musset's Nouvelles in 1848.

5. Since Andrea's dates are 1486-1530, Michelangelo, who died in 1564, was still alive at the time of Musset's protagonist's death.

6. Not in 1537, as in George Sand's title for her scène historique.

7. See my Theater of Solitude. The Drama of Alfred de Musset, chapter 6, for a more complete analysis of the play's action.

8. The Italian suffix -accio traditionally applied to Lorenzo is pejorative. Curiously, Alexandre Dumas père entitled his play on the same subject Lorenzino, emphasizing, as does Musset, Lorenzo's small stature, which—along with Lorenzo's apparent sexual ambivalence and his lack of “masculine” courage—may explain why the role was played by female actors, starting with Sarah Bernhardt, for over half a century.

9. I do not share the view expressed in Bernard Masson's otherwise exemplary study, Musset et le théâtre intérieur (see in particular p. 394), that the painter, Tebaldeo, as well as other young figures is in some way spared from the general cynicism of the play and represents a triumph of art over crass political realism.