ÁNGEL DE SAAVEDRA Y RAMÍREZ DE BAQUEDANO, Duke of Rivas. - Spanish writer and statesman, b. at Córdoba on 10 May 1791, d. at Madrid on 22 June 1865.
A noble Andalusian, educated at the Seminario de Nobles in Madrid, he was liberal in his youth and conservative in maturity, influenced by English customs (he spent 11 years in exile in England, Italy and Malta) and by Romantic trends. On his return to Spain he served as ambassador to Naples and Paris and as Minister of the Interior.
In 1835 he published *Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino*, a lurid tragedy, ostentatiously theatrical (S. was also a painter), in which Romanticism swells into Baroque and fate rages obsessively; one need only recall Verdi’s musical commentary. Of particular note is the inner struggle in the protagonist between the punctilio of honour demanded by the knightly sentiments of old and the Christian will to forgive imposed by his new religious outlook. In 1842 he produced the symbolic drama *El desengaño en un sueño*, echoing Calderón and Shakespeare and drawing on his experience of exile, in which S. argues that only far from society can man find happiness. In the *Romances históricos* (1840) he drew on Spanish history or imagination to revive a genre dear to Spanish tradition, in a highly personal style marked by a fondness for sound and colour.