The widow of Pisa
The Widow of Pisa is a novella by the German Nobel Prize winner for literature Paul Heyse from 1865.
The novella was translated into Danish (Enken fra Pisa, 1873) and Polish (Wdowa z Pizy, 1923).
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The small German state in which the narrator Ferdinand and his dear bride live is so tiny that a cannonball, if it were fired from the capital, could easily reach a neighboring state. The country's father sent the architect Ferdinand to Italy on a study trip for a year ; Subject: The crooked Italian towers.
In Pisa, finding a place to live is proving to be difficult. But the Campanile of the Cathedral has to be processed. Ferdinand is lucky in the Borgo, a street near the Arno . The 23-year-old attractive widow Lucrezia, an opera singer, takes him in, although her uncle, the guardian of her group of small children, is strictly against it: renting out rooms to gentlemen is fundamentally undesirable - because of the landlady's good reputation. Ferdinand, who pays the rent in advance, is still lucky. The relentless uncle has just left; researches the whereabouts of Lucrezia's husband, the composer Sor Carlo. Lucrezia does not understand the uncle's search. Sor Carlo had traveled to Naples ten months ago . Brigantes had mailed the wife two cut ears including a ransom demand. Lucrezia, looking for a man, wants Ferdinand. He hides his German bride because he is worried about his room in the Borgo. Lucrezia draws attention to the formerly splendid baritone Tobia Seresi at the Teatro Politeama Ferdinand in Pisa . The singer had gone mad six years ago in the middle of a duet with Lucrezia. Because Lucrezia is ensnaring Ferdinand more and more aggressively, the helpless architect gradually fears the same fate. Before Ferdinand goes completely mad, he secretly moves out and flees to La Spezia at the Hotel Croce di Malta.
Across from Palmaria in the pirate's nest Portovenere, Ferdinand meets Sor Carlo in good health with a pair of untrimmed ears in the local Albergo e Trattoria. Ferdinand knows the gentleman from the portrait in Lucrezia's living room.
Sor Carlos friend from Naples had taken part in a joke. He wanted to protect the composer, who had been working on his next opera for five months near Amalfi , from Lucrezia and the lively little children. When the composer then needed a piano, he moved home to the north of Italy.
Ferdinand meets Lucrezia in the alley. The farce has come to an end: Lucrezia - now a very lady - only estimates Ferdinand with an empty phrase.
literature
expenditure
- The widow of Pisa p. 233-272 in: Paul Heyse: The girl from Treppi. Italian love stories. With an afterword by Gotthard Erler . Illustrations: Wolfgang Würfel . 512 pages. Book publisher der Morgen, Berlin 1965
Secondary literature
- Werner Martin (Ed.): Paul Heyse. A bibliography of his works. With an introduction by Prof. Dr. Norbert Miller . 187 pages. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 1978 (typewriter font), ISBN 3-487-06573-8
Web links
- The text
- The widow of Pisa in the Gutenberg-DE project
- online in the Internet archive (pp. 206-235 in Paul Heyse, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6: Novellen III. Wilhelm Hertz , Berlin 1890, 5th ed.)
- Entries in WorldCat