Ferdinando Fontana


Ferdinando Fontana was an Italian journalist, dramatist, and poet. He is best known today for having written the libretti of the first two operas by Giacomo Puccini – Le Villi and Edgar.

Biography

Born at Milan, then part of the Austrian Empire, into a family of artists - both his father Carlo and his brother Roberto were painters - he entered a Barnabite school at the age of seven and then went on to study at the Collegio Zambelli. He was forced to abandon his studies while still young to provide for himself and his two younger sisters following the death of their mother. During that period, he worked in a series of menial jobs before becoming a copy editor for the newspaper Corriere di Milano. This brought him into contact with the world of journalism and literature, which was to become his career.
An exponent of the second Scapigliatura artistic movement, Fontana was a very versatile writer. Apart from his plays and opera libretti, he wrote poems, travel books, and articles in various Italian newspapers, including the Milanese daily Corriere della Sera. From 1878 to 1879 he was the Berlin correspondent for the Gazzetta Piemontese in Turin.
In 1881–1882, Fontana with his colleague Dario Papa, an influential editor of the Corriere della Sera, made a journey through the United States from New York to San Francisco. In New York he befriended Adolfo Rossi, the editor-in-chief of the Italian language newspaper Il Progresso Italo-Americano and contributed to the recently established daily.
As a journalist, he wrote such books as Un briciolo di mezzaluna ; Montecarlo; Tra gli Arabi ; New-York ; and a collection of Viaggi in two volumes, published in Milan in 1893.
During his time in Milan, Fontana wrote two plays in Milanese dialect, La Pina Madamin and La Statôa del sciôr Incioda. Both had considerable success and starred Edoardo Ferravilla, considered one of the greatest comic actors in Milanese theatre. He wrote numerous libretti, including two for Alberto Franchetti and two for Puccini. He wrote the libretto for Edgar in Caprino Bergamasco, where fellow librettist Antonio Ghislanzoni ran a hotel for artists.
He also translated several operetta libretti for performance in Italy, including Franz Lehár's Die lustige Witwe and Der Graf von Luxemburg , Oskar Nedbal's Polenblut, and Edmund Eysler's Der Frauenfresser . Early in his career, Fontana's output was prodigious: an 1886 article in La Stampa said that at the time, 13 new libretti by Fontana were being composed by 12 different composers.
A committed and passionate socialist, he took part in the Milanese demonstrations in 1898 which led to the Bava-Beccaris massacre. Because of the repressions which followed, he fled to Switzerland where he first lived in Montagnola, a small town near Lugano. He remained in Switzerland until his death, living a modest life, and greatly reducing his literary activities.
Fontana died in Lugano in 1919, at the age of 69.

Texts set to music

Unless indicated otherwise, the texts were opera libretti.