page_title: Carlo Goldoni
section_title: Theatrical career
hierarchical_section_title: Carlo Goldoni / Biography / Theatrical career
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Statua di Carlo Goldoni, Piazza Goldoni, Firenze. English: Statue of Carlo Goldoni in Florence (Piazza Goldoni). Deutsch: Carlo-Goldoni-Statue in Florenz (Piazza Goldoni).
context_page_description: Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade, which he claimed in his memoirs the "Arcadians of Rome" bestowed on him.
context_section_description: Goldoni entered the Italian theatre scene with a tragedy, Amalasunta, produced in Milan. The play was a critical and financial failure.
  Submitting it to Count Prata, director of the opera, he was told that his piece "was composed with due regard for the rules of Aristotle and Horace, but not according to those laid down for the Italian drama." "In France", continued the count, "you can try to please the public, but here in Italy it is the actors and actresses whom you must consult, as well as the composer of the music and the stage decorators. Everything must be done according to a certain form which I will explain to you."
  Goldoni thanked his critic, went back to his inn and ordered a fire, into which he threw the manuscript of his Amalasunta.
  His next play, Belisario, written in 1734, was more successful, though of its success he afterward professed himself ashamed.
  During this period he also wrote librettos for opera seria and served for a time as literary director of the San Giovanni Grisostomo, Venice's most distinguished opera house.
  He wrote other tragedies for a time, but he was not long in discovering that his bent was for comedy. He had come to realize that the Italian stage needed reforming; adopting Molière as his model, he went to work in earnest and in 1738 produced his first real comedy, L'uomo di mondo ("The Man of the World"). During his many wanderings and adventures in Italy, he was constantly at work and when, at Livorno, he became acquainted with the manager Medebac, he determined to pursue the profession of playwriting in order to make a living. He was employed by Medebac to write plays for his theater in Venice. He worked for other managers and produced during his stay in that city some of his most characteristic works. He also wrote Momolo Cortesan in 1738. By 1743, he had perfected his hybrid style of playwriting (combining the model of Molière with the strengths of Commedia dell'arte and his own wit and sincerity). This style was typified in La Donna di garbo, the first Italian comedy of its kind.
  After 1748, Goldoni collaborated with the composer Baldassare Galuppi, making significant contributions to the new form of 'opera buffa'. Galuppi composed the score for more than twenty of Goldoni's librettos. As with his comedies, Goldoni's opera buffa integrate elements of the Commedia dell'arte with recognisable local and middle-class realities. His operatic works include two of the most successful musical comedies of the eighteenth century, Il filosofo di campagna (The Country Philosopher), set by Galuppi (1752) and La buona figliuola (The Good Girl), set by Niccolò Piccinni (1760).
  In 1753, following his return from Bologna, he defected to the Teatro San Luca of the Vendramin family, where he performed most of his plays to 1762.
caption: Monument to Goldoni in Florence (sculpted by Ulisse Cambi)
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