The life of the 19th Century author of Fantastic Tales and Passion, the novel that inspired Stephen Sondheim's award-winning musical.
Iginio Ugo (I.U.) Tarchetti was born in the Piedmont region of Italy in 1839. His family was well to do and his upbringing comfortable, and as a young man Tarchetti secured a position as an officer in the Italian army. His military career ended in 1865, however, due to Tarchetti’s increasingly poor health and because of an affair he had had with his commanding officer’s cousin.
Following his discharge from the army, Tarchetti began to focus on his literary aspirations and became part of an artistic movement in Milan known as the scapigliatura. The scapigiliati, or disheveled ones, were a group of writers, poets, painters and composers who embraced Bohemianism and indifference toward convention. They thought little of the established artistic and social values of the time, and rejected class-consciousness in favor of realism and newer, freer forms of expression. Tarchetti’s work followed suit, mocking the bourgeoisie and recounting his contempt for the intolerant discipline of the military, using the romantic affair that had caused his expulsion as firsthand material.
Tarchetti’s novel Passion (originally published as Fosca) involves a young military officer’s liaison with the cousin of his commander. The cousin, Fosca, is no demure, beautiful maiden, but rather a grotesquely thin, almost ghoulish woman who suffers from various physical and neurotic ailments. Although Giorgio, the character based on Tarchetti, is initially repulsed by Fosca, her unusual intelligence and insight into life, as well as her curious and obsessive passion, soon draw him into an ultimately tragic web of events.
Tarchetti’s Passion was the basis for the 1981 Italian film, Passione d’Amore, directed by Ettore Scola. Scola’s film was in turn adapted by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine for the Tony Award winning musical, Passion. In an interesting Gothic twist beyond the novel itself, Tarchetti—who had been writing the chapters for a periodical in serial installments—became too ill with both tuberculosis and typhus to finish the work. Following his death in 1869, Tarchetti’s friend and fellow writer Salvatore Farina penned an integral missing chapter of the novel. Farina’s chapter fits in seamlessly and by its addition, Tarchetti’s Passion was allowed to exist in a completed form.
Tarchetti is also known for a collection of stories entitled Fantastic Tales. Fantastic in the truly odd and bizarre sense of the word, the tales include a man’s irrational fear of the letter U and a raspberry that possesses the soul of the person who eats it. Although once considered less-than-famous or even forgotten, Tarchetti’s reputation is increasing and he is often compared to Edgar Allan Poe, another author remembered for his dark imagination and too-short and tormented life.
Beware The Haunted Raspberry: Review of I.U. Tarchetti’s Fantastic Tales, James Marcus, New York Times, August 23, 1992
Introduction to I.U. Tarchetti's Passion, Lawrence Venuti (Mercury House, 1994)
Fantastic Tales, I.U. Tarchetti, translated by Lawrence Venuti (Mercury House, 1992)
