BRACCO, ROBERTO. — Playwright and writer of novellas, born in Naples in 1862, died in Sorrento on 20 April 1943.
Having entered journalism at a very young age, he became one of the most incisive and admired theatrical and musical critics of the late nineteenth century.
He fought his battle, especially in the Corriere di Napoli, on behalf of Ibsen and Wagner, before they became the idols of the cultivated public. At the same time he attempted the dialogue novella, from which the step to comedy and drama was a short one. A realist in Una donna (1892), an impressionist in Mauchere (1893), he established himself in the following two years with the crystalline and elegant wit of L'infedele and the dramatic passion of Il trionfo. From then on, each year marked a new stage and a new success: from La fine dell'amore to Maternità and Frutto acerbo, from Piccola fonte to Nellina and Il piccolo santo (1911), his masterpiece. Powerful in dramatic conflict, unmistakable in his delicate or mischievous grace, he brings his figures vividly to life, creating them in a single burst, with exuberant impetus. Although his theater is characteristically Italian, often Neapolitan, and sometimes dialectal (Uocchie cunsacrate, 1916), it nevertheless met with very rapid success in various countries. The same was true, moreover, of his production as a writer of novellas, which was not independent of the dramatist’s art: each novella is in nuce a dramatic action, often also experienced theatrically or capable of being reproduced on stage. B. lacked a sound moral orientation, as is evident from the realism of the illicit loves around which the narrative action often develops. B., intolerant of every yoke and constraint both in his artistic and in his political life, died during the Second World War, embittered by the sad reality and the looming catastrophe, poor as he had lived.