Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón y Ariza , (born March 10, 1833 in Guadix , province of Granada , † July 19, 1891 in Madrid ) was a Spanish writer and belonged to the literary movement of realism of the 19th century, in which the change from of romanticism in the new epoch.

Life

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón was born in Guadix into a family of impoverished aristocrats; his grandfather had been in the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon Regidor and wore the famous three-cornered hat and red capa . Pedro Antonio studied law at the University of Granada from 1847 , but since the family could no longer finance his studies, he went back to Guadix to the seminary, where he was able to credit part of the studies for theology. Soon he felt his literary vocation and became involved with other writers in the group of the Granada Cuerda . At that time there was a flood of books due to the closure of many monasteries in the so-called desamortización , so he read a lot and also began to write, initially plays that were also premiered by a lay company; however, these pieces have not survived. Initially he devoted himself to journalism . In Granada he was also attracted by politics, which developed from extreme liberalism and hostility to the church to arch-conservative Catholicism . Together with Torcuato Tárrago y Mateos, a writer of dime novels, he published the magazine El Eco de Occidente , where his first stories were also printed. In 1853 he left the seminary and his parents and went to Granada. Annoyed by the reactionary environment there, he soon settled in Madrid . There he published the anti-clerical and anti-dynastic magazine El Látigo (The Whip), wrote under the pseudonym "El hijo pródigo" (The Prodigal Son) against the church, army and monarchy, and moved in the post-romantic bohemian scene. Due to a duel with the journalist and poet Heriberto García de Quevedo, who shot into the air and so generously gave him his life, Alarcón went through a crisis of conscience and from then on swung to a conservative attitude. He retired to Segovia for some time , revised some of his earlier texts and wrote another play. In 1857 he went back to Madrid, where he wrote society columns for the magazine La Época and one of his youth novels, El final de Norma , was in print.

Partly disappointed by the political arbitrariness, he put his youthful energy into the war in Morocco , from which he brought back a book that became famous: Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de África (Diary of a Witness to the War of Africa). For a short time he lived as a follower of Leopoldo O'Donnell, exiled in Paris in 1866. He made a trip to Italy and later became a member of parliament and government advisor to King Alfonso XII.

Alarcón published his most important literary texts between 1874 and 1881. In 1877 he was accepted into the Real Academia Española and gave an inaugural address entitled “Sobre la moral en el arte” (On morality in art). Since 1887, convinced that he had given everything on the path to realism , he vowed to remain silent. Perhaps the reason for this was the open hostility to his old liberal comrades. At the age of 50 he retired to his finca in Valdemero near Madrid and only took care of his plants and vegetables. He suffered a stroke in 1888 and finally died in Madrid in 1891.

Works

• De Madrid a Nápoles 1861
• La Alpujarra 1873
• El sombrero de tres picos , novella 1874
• El escándalo , novel 1875
• El niño de la bola , novel 1880
• La pródiga , novel 1882
• Cuentos amatorios , Tales 1881
• El Capitán Veneno 1881
• Historietas nacionales 1881
• Narraciones inverosímiles 1882
• Viajes por España , travelogues 1883

• Overview of the works of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón in the Spanish original , including the possibility of acquiring them.

reception

German editions

• The Prophecy. (La Buenaventura.) Translated by Lida Winiewicz. Historietas nacionales series. Madrid 1885
  • Excerpt from Adalbert Keil Ed .: Die Prophezeiung. Gypsy stories , including PAdA (same title). Row: Goldmanns Yellow TB # 1622. Munich 1965. pp. 89–97 (anthology, first Desch, ibid. 1964)
• The tricorn. A Spanish novella . Row: Library, 223rd Insel, Leipzig 1940
• Captain Veneno and common sense . 2nd edition 1956
• The scandal. Novel. Series: Library of World Literature. Transferred by Heinrich Bondy. Safari, Berlin 1959
• The spendthrift. Novel. Transferred by Paula Saatmann. Frick, Vienna 1942
• The judge's advertisement. Free transfer by Arnold Krieger. Ill. Hans Thomamichel. Reprint of the 2nd edition 1950: Darmstadt 1991

Musical arrangements

Manuel de Falla arranged El sombrero de tres picos (" The three- cornered hat ") in his ballet of the same name in 1919 in a scenic and musical manner.

Hugo Wolf's opera Der Corregidor (1896) is also based on:

Wolf, Hugo: The Corregidor : Opera in four acts; Text based on a novella by Alarcon. Text by Rosa Mayreder-Obermayer. Complete piano reduction by the composer Mannheim: Heckel, 1896.

Wolf, Hugo: Complete works : critical complete edition. Edited by d. Boarding school Hugo Wolf Ges. under [d.] lead by Hans Jancik. Vienna: Musikwissenschaftl. Verlag, 12.3 “Der Corregidor”: Opera in four acts; Text based on a novella by Pedro de Alarcon; Libretto by Rosa Mayreder-Obermayer 1995. ISBN 3-900270-31-7

Film adaptations

• "Il has a tre punte", Italy 1934.
• "La pícara molinera", Spain / France 1954.

Web links

Wikisource: Pedro Antonio de Alarcón  - Sources and full texts (Spanish)

• Literature by and about Pedro Antonio de Alarcón in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón in the Gutenberg-DE project
• Works by and about Pedro Antonio de Alarcón at Open Library