by Jamie James
4 The final verse contains an uncharacteristic lapse in classical learning: Platen confuses Capri with Pandateria, where Julia was exiled after her adulteries were exposed.
5 Jean Nouguès, who had recently had a success with his opera Quo Vadis, based on Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel set in Rome during the reign of Nero.
6 “Immortal paganism, are you dead? So we say, / But Pan mocks in a whisper, and the Siren laughs.” Brooks’s usage of Sirène in the singular is unusual, and anticipates the name of Compton Mackenzie’s fictional Capri.
7 Released in 1917, the film is not based on Anatole France’s novel, which inspired Jules Massenet’s opera. The scenario, by Bragaglia and Riccardo Cassano, is a conventional deadly-diva thriller with a contemporary setting, about a diabolical seductress who wreaks havoc in her fast aristocratic set and dies inhaling deadly perfumes in a secret chamber of horrors in her bizarre mansion. The film was believed lost until a unique print was discovered, miscatalogued, at the Cinémathèque Française and screened at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, in 1970.
