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Everything is related to Naples entry June 2008
Number 27 in a
series. Links to parts:
Fučík,
Verdi,
Mike & Lola, the
Sicilian Vespers & the Aragonese Crusade
“Mamma mia!...”
(gasp!
sputter!)
says
Verdi
from
somewhere in the great Litigation-Happy Afterlife,
“Fučík stole that from the overture to my
opera, I Vespri Siciliani!” Maybe he
did; maybe he didn’t, but law suits for plagiarism in music have been
won on a
lot less evidence. (For example, Al Jolson had to shell out $25,000 to
Puccini
in 1920 because the song Avalon
sounded too much like "E lucevan le stelle"
from
Tosca. It did and still
does, but Fučík’s march
is even more egregious. (That twenty-five Large
was worth about $250,000 in today’s money, made more
severe because the judgment also included all future royalties
from the
song!) Verdi’s opera The
Sicilian Vespers is from 1855 and was originally set to a French
libretto
and then
rewritten in Italian. It is about a complex episode in
the
Italian Middle Ages, one which all Italian school children learn about
(and
then hurry to forget); it helped shape the The death of Frederick II in 1250 set off a
power struggle between his successors of
the
Hohenstaufen dynasty and the Papacy-backed French house of Anjou—the Angevins— who, after a few decades of
warfare, took the kingdom and
changed it
from the Kingdom of Sicily to the Kingdom of Naples (with the city of
Naples as
capital). Then, on Easter Monday, 1282, at evening prayers (the vespers), an
incident of insult or harassment between a Frenchman (“occupiers” in
the minds
of many Sicilians still loyal to the Hohenstaufens) and a woman outside
the
church of the Holy Spirit in Palermo set off a revolt—now called
the War of the Sicilian Vespers—that spread and
eventually resulted in the Angevin French being driven from Sicily;
that power
void was filled by the Aragonese dynasty from Catalonia. (See The Crown
of The French did not
lose it lightly. In what must have seemed like a continuation of the
decades of
war against the Hohenstaufens, the Angevins waged war against the
Catalonian
encroachers. Their efforts were sanctioned as a “crusade,” by the
Pope—thus,
the "Aragonese Crusade," described by historian H. J. Chaytor
(in A History of Aragon and Catalonia, Methuan
Publishing Ltd., London, 1933) as "perhaps the most unjust, unnecessary
and calamitous enterprise ever undertaken by the Capetian monarchy.
(The
Angevins were a “cadet branch”—meaning descendent—of the Capetians.) The crusade was declared by Pope Martin IV
in 1284, against
the King of Aragon, Peter III. The war was waged in
Verdi is not available. Send me the money! to
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I don’t know that
Verdi ever heard Julius Fučík’s march, 
