Les Brigands from Friedrich Schiller to Giuseppe Verdi A Double Cultural Transfer

By comparing Schiller’s Die Räuber and Verdi’s I masnadieri, J.-F. Candoni’s article highlights the mechanisms of a double transfer, from spoken theatre to musical theatre, and from Sturm und Drang Germany to pre-Risorgimento Italy. Verdi and his librettist Maffei, bring their libretto up to the standard Italian operatic repertory. Such a transfer provides the starting point of a more literary phase of opera that would reach its climax in the second half of the nineteenth century.