Life
Maffei was born in Molina di Ledro, Trentino.
A follower of Vincenzo Monti, he formed part of the 19th century Italian classicist literary culture. Gaining laurea in jurisprudence, he moved for some years to Verona, then to Venice and finally to Milan, where in 1831 he married contessa Clara Spinelli. They separated by mutual consent on 15 June 1846.
Skilled in foreign languages, he translated several works of English and German literature into Italian, particularly the plays of Schiller, Shakespeare's Othello and The Tempest, many works of Goethe (including Faust) and John Milton's Paradise Lost. In his translations he sought to adapt the author's original thought to that of the Italian literary public. Not only a translator, he was also a poet and Romanticist. For Giuseppe Verdi he wrote the famous libretto for I masnadieri, drawn from Schiller, and re-wrote some verses from Francesco Maria Piave's libretto for Macbeth. He was also a librettist for Pietro Mascagni, writing the texts for his Il Re a Napoli in Cremona (1885) and Guglielmo Ratcliff (1895, from Heinrich Heine's 1822 play William Ratcliff).
As well as Verdi, Maffei also built up close relationships with others in the Italian cultural scene of the time, including Vincenzo Monti, Antonio Rosmini, Gino Capponi, Mario Rapisardi, Carlo Tenca, the painter Francesco Hayez, and the sculptors Vincenzo Vela and Giovanni Duprè. Key cultural figures from the rest of Europe also passed through the lounge of his house in Milan, including Liszt and Stendhal. In 1879 Andrea Maffei was made a senator of the Kingdom of Italy and participated in Italian political life. In the mid-19th century he frequently lived at Riva del Garda, where he organised his rich art collection and where, in 1935, the town's Liceo classico was named after him.
He died in Milan in 1885.
Read more about this topic: Andrea Maffei
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The richest princes and the poorest beggars are to have one great and just judge at the last day who will not distinguish between them according to their ranks when in life but according to the neglected opportunities afforded to each. How much greater then, as the opportunities were greater, must be the condemnation of the one than of the other?”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)