Mediated Translation between Italian and Russian Languages: The Case of the Opera La forza del destino

La forza del destino was commissioned to Giuseppe Verdi by the St Petersburg Imperial Theatres in 1861. The opera was written on a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave and draws its subject from the Spanish drama Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino by Ángel de Saavedra. Piave worked on the Italian version by Faustino Sanseverino and, according to Verdi’s indication, inserted fragments from Schiller’s trilogy Wallenstein. The opera premiered in November 1862 at the Bol’shoy Kamenny Theatre but only had a succès d’estime. In this paper, I try to explain the opera’s cold reception focusing on the discrepancies emerging between the Italian libretto and the Russian translation prepared by Apollon Grigor’yev for the first staging. I will consider the typical derivation of Italian operatic librettos from pre-existing literary works. This process combines mediated and inter-semiotic translation, allowing me to show the artistic resources mediated translation offers in stage literature.