Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (58 page)

Theater

Theodora’s theater popularity is not limited to Sardou’s play. In Averil Cameron,
Procopius and the Sixth Century
, p. 77 and n. 63, we read of a 1956 Arabic-language play, translated into Syriac in 1977. Additionally, Maria
Luisa Bigai has kindly reported about
Teodora,
a theatrical version in fourteen “frames” of Procopius’s
Secret History
, by Andrea Camilleri, which was successfully performed at the Teatro Tordinona in Rome in 1975. Federica Giulietta played the part of Theodora.

Justinian, not Theodora, appears on pp. 26 foll. of the “dramatic
satura
” by G. Giudici,
Il Paradiso: Perché mi vinse il lume d’esta stella
(The Paradiso: Why I Was Captured by the Light of This Star) (Genoa, 1991), performed at the Petruzzelli Theater in Bari in 1991. Finally, despite the efforts of Maria Luisa Agati, to whom I am thankful, I could not find more details about a
Teodora
that was recently staged in Rome, with the Greek actress Irene Papas in the leading role.

Music

Sardou’s
Théodora
was performed in 1883 with incidental music by Jules Massenet. An opera evolved from the play:
Théodora
, music by Xavier-H. N. Leroux, lyrics by V. Sardou and P. Ferrier, first performed at the Monte Carlo Casino in 1907 (also staged at the Teatro alla Scala in 1909), and a ballet,
Teodora
, music by Romualdo Marenco, choreography by Raffaele Grassi, performed at the Scala in 1889.

Visual Arts

I cannot add anything to what Browning has written in
Justinian and Theodora
, except to note Theodora’s presence in an installation that has been called an “icon of feminist art”:
The Dinner Party,
by American artist Judy Chicago. The work was first shown in 1979 and is expected to be on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2004.

The present book was originally published in Italian in 2001. Thus I was unable to consider Clive Foss’s remarkable essay “The Empress Theodora,” published in
Byzantion
LXXII (2002): 141–176. Foss’s interpretation of Theodora coincides with mine on several points, even though we pursued independent and different paths in our research.

I was, however, able to avail myself for this English-language edition of the information presented in a review by Carmelo Capizzi of the first Italian edition, as well as other foreign-language editions. The observations presented in his “Un nuovo ritratto–icona dell’imperatrice Teodora,” in
La Civiltà Cattolica
CLIII 2, no. 3644 (April 20, 2002): 165–171, were very helpful.

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———.
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