Saavedra y Ramírez de Baquedano, Ángel de

SAAVEDRA Y RAMÍREZ DE BAQUEDANO, ÁNGEL DE. - Spanish writer and politician, b. at Cordova on 10 May 1791, d. at Madrid on 22 June 1865.

An Andalusian nobleman, educated at the Seminario de Nobles in Madrid, a liberal in his youth and, in maturity, a conservative, he was influenced by English customs (he spent 11 years in exile in England, Italy and Malta) and by the 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 bloodthirsty tragedy, sumptuously spectacular in its staging (S. was also a painter), in which Romanticism swells with the Baroque and fate rages obsessively: one recalls Verdi's musical setting. Particularly noteworthy is the inner struggle, in the protagonist, between the punctilio of honour, demanded by the feelings of the knight he once was, and the will to Christian forgiveness, imposed by his new religious habit. From 1842 comes the symbolic drama El desengaño en un sueño, in which, with echoes of Calderón and Shakespeare and drawing on his experience as an exile, S. maintains that only far from society can man be happy. In the Romances históricos (1840) S., drawing on his country's history or on fantasy, recreates a genre dear to the Spanish tradition, with a highly personal style, with a relish for sound and colour.