SAAVEDRA Y RAMÍREZ DE BAQUEDANO, ANGEL de. - Spanish writer and statesman, b. at Cordova, 10 May 1791; d. at Madrid, 22 June 1865.
An Andalusian nobleman, educated at the Seminario dei nobili in Madrid, liberal in his youth and conservative in maturity, he was influenced by English manners (he spent eleven years in exile in England, Italy, and Malta) and by Romantic currents. Having returned to his homeland, he was ambassador to Naples and Paris and Minister of the Interior.
In 1835 he published Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino, a truculent tragedy with lavish stage effects (S. was also a painter), in which Romanticism swells into Baroque and fate rages obsessively: one may recall Verdi’s musical commentary. Especially emphasized is the protagonist’s inner struggle between the point of honour demanded by the sentiments of the knight of former times and the will to Christian forgiveness imposed by his new religious habit. The symbolic drama El desengaño en un sueño dates from 1842; in it, with echoes of Calderón and Shakespeare and drawing upon his experience as an exile, S. maintains that man can be happy only when far from society. In the Romances históricos (1840), drawing upon national history or fantasy, S. recreated a genre dear to Spanish tradition, in a highly personal style, with a fondness for sound and colour.