Luigi Rasi

Teatro, letteratura e ricerca si intrecciano indissolubilmente nell’opera e nella vita di Luigi Rasi (1852-1918), direttore della Regia Scuola di Recitazione di Firenze e ultimo esponente di un’illustre tradizione ottocentesca di insegnamento della declamazione come disciplina principe della scena. Figura ibrida di attore, studioso e docente, dotato di una vasta cultura, Rasi seppe attraversare i confini tra le arti, in dialogo con le istanze del suo tempo e in una prospettiva europea. La sua concezione della scena fu in grado di coniugare la storia con la sperimentazione: entro questo contesto egli concepì la formazione teatrale come un tassello fondamentale di un più ampio progetto di riforma del teatro italiano e del suo rapporto con la società, dai cui semi fecondi sarebbero scaturiti frutti anche nei decenni successivi del Novecento. Grazie anche alla valorizzazione di materiali e di carteggi inediti, il volume ricostruisce in una prospettiva unitaria la figura e l’attività di Rasi e ne spiega il contributo determinante, lungo direzioni inedite, alla storia del teatro.

The essay focuses on the music and theatre performances led by Luigi Rasi, Director of the “Regia Scuola di Recitazione di Firenze” (Royal School of Acting of Florence since 1882 to 1918. Actor, writer, historian of theatre and teacher of declamation, Rasi brought on stage several melodramas, from Bürger’s Lenore to Schumann’s Manfred. In collaboration with the “Regio Istituto Musicale di Firenze” (Royal Music Institute of Florence) and in dialogue with different European intellectuals (among others, Arnaldo Bonaventura, Edward Dent, Edgardo Maddalena) Rasi researched a new relationship between music and declamation, a field of experimentation which would have later found a larger fortune also in Italy.

In the twentieth century, in Italy was born a new category of actors: actors trained in a school. Previously, actors had always been trained in theatre companies or in the amateur sector, and they always had a very similar way of thinking about their craft and practicing it. Actors trained in schools broke the previous homogeneity. We will see how through the example of Teresa Franchini, the best student of the first real Italian public school of acting, and through the letters she wrote to her teacher Luigi Rasi.

The essay focuses on four different mise-en-scène of the Manfred by Lord Byron with musics by Schumann which took place in France between 1886 and 1912, thanks to four different protagonists of the French and European theatre of those years: Jean Mounet-Sully, Aurélien Lugné-Poe, Adolphe Appia, and Émile Moreau. Using their peculiar qualities as actors and directors, each of them found in the Manfred, a poem which was originally intended by Lord Byron as not to be staged, an opportunity to discover new areas of experimentation in their artistic and theatrical careers: the musicality of the declamation for Mounet-Sully, the research on new theatrical languages for Lugné-Poe, the uses of lights and stage design for Appia, and the relations between opera, music and spoken text for Moreau.

The artistic path of young Gabriellino d'Annunzio, undertaken against his father's will, has a decisive starting point with the frequentation of the Royal School of Acting in Florence between 1904 and 1905. The director of the School is the Italian actor and man of letters Luigi Rasi, with whom d'Annunzio himself, with the mediation of Eleonora Duse, has different artistic collaborations from the debut of Gioconda in 1899 to the rehearsals of Francesca da Rimini in 1901. Gabriellino takes part in the 'artistic lectures' directed by Rasi, whose teachings constitute an important trace in his future theatrical career. Two letters from Rasi to d'Annunzio and the correspondence of Gabriellino with the other students of the School, along with their memories, allow to understand more clearly the cultural and literary value of a theatre that was first of all, as later defined by Marino Moretti, «a meeting of poets in the search of the new».

http://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni/riviste/archivio-dannunzio/2017/4/

The essay proposes an investigation into the classification of the four metals of the voice (bronze voice, golden voice, silver voice and veiled voice) presented in Italy by Luigi Rasi, director of the Royal School of Acting of Florence from 1882 to 1918 and author, between the others, of a treatise on declamation ("La lettura ad alta voce", Florence 1883). Through a study conducted in a large number of literary and historical texts, the essay intends to present the variety of sources which marked the birth and the fortune of this classification of the voice. Within this context, Rasi’s fundamental contribution configures the passage from a literary model into a theatrical one, systematizing this classification and placing it at the service of the teaching of the art of reading aloud, considered as a true science on stage.

http://www.unior.it/ateneo/4364/1/annali-sezione-romanza.html