And Twentieth-Century Musical Adaptations of Dante’S ‘Commedia’: ‘Dante’S Greatest Hits’

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies Volume 1 Dante and Music Article 10 2018 NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSICAL ADAPTATIONS OF DANTE’S ‘COMMEDIA’: ‘DANTE’S GREATEST HITS’ Maria Ann Roglieri Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/bibdant Part of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture Commons, Italian Language and Literature Commons, Medieval History Commons, and the Music Commons Recommended Citation Roglieri, Maria Ann (2018) "NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSICAL ADAPTATIONS OF DANTE’S ‘COMMEDIA’: ‘DANTE’S GREATEST HITS’," Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies: Vol. 1 , Article 10. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/bibdant/vol1/iss1/10 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/bibdant/vol1/iss1/10 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Roglieri: ‘DANTE’S GREATEST HITS’ Bibliotheca Dantesca, 1 (2018): 177-195 NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSICAL ADAPTATIONS OF DANTE’S ‘COMMEDIA’: ‘DANTE’S GREATEST HITS’ MARIA ANN ROGLIERI, St. Thomas Aquinas College Composers through the centuries have tried to depict Dante’s Commedia in music, using Dante’s verses, characters, and design for Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and their compositions. This paper looks at some of the trends in musical adaptations of the Commedia and also some of the “greatest hits”—in the author’s opinion. Works by James Norton, Patric Standford, Jacob ter Veldhuis, David Denniston, Franz Liszt, Donald Martino, Tod Machover, Anita Saij, Allik and Mulder, and Theodore Wiprud are discussed. Keywords: Dante, Music, James Norton, Patric Standford, Jacob ter Veldhuis, David Denniston, Franz Liszt, Donald Martino, Tod Machover I have heard that the gloomy idea has occurred to Donizetti to set a canto of Dante to music. This seems to me hubristic: at such an un- dertaking I don’t believe that the eternal father could succeed, even if he were a composer of music.1 These comments were made by Rossini in the early nineteenth century about a small vocal piece by Donizetti. Ironically, Rossini himself ultimately composed two such adaptations. Yet his con- cerns about the appropriateness and the feasibility of adapting Dante’s verses to music are not uncommon among the hundreds of composers who have tailored Dante’s poem to music through the centuries. Italian composer Pacini, for example, several years after Rossini’s comments, begged forgiveness from his colleagues for at- tempting so formidable a task in his Sinfonia Dante (1863).2 Simi- larly, when twentieth-century English composer Patrick Standford composed his Symphony No. 3: Toward Paradise (1983), he 1 Giuseppe Radiciotti, Gioacchino Rossini: Vita documentata: opere ed influenza su l’arte (Tivoli: Arti Grafiche Majella di A. Chicca, 1927), 321–322. English translation is my own. 2 Giovanni Pacini, Le Mie Memorie Artistiche (edite ed inedite) (Firenze: Tip. dei successori Le Monnier, 1875), 126–127. ~ 177 ~ Published by ScholarlyCommons, 2018 1 Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies, Vol. 1 [2018], Art. 10 Roglieri: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Adaptations divorced himself from Dante’s text so as not to be too “arrogant,” thus freeing himself up to offer only an interpretation.3 Others acknowledged a certain craziness in the attempt to illustrate musically the world of Dante’s Commedia. A music critic described American composer Donald Martino’s Paradiso Choruses as “crazy in its ambitions to match in music what already is match- less in our civilization.”4 Martino himself acknowledged that his attempt was “crazy and presumptuous.”5 Craziness notwithstanding, by my count, in the last six centuries, more than 300 musical adaptations of Dante’s poem have been created.6 Most of these represented musical illustrations of particular episodes in one of the three canticles. Episodes from Par- adiso have become increasingly popular in recent years. Episodes from Inferno have been consistently popular. Purgatorio, mean- while, has received little attention from composers, adapted only in the last two centuries to several small pieces, symphonies, and a string quartet. Generally, Dante’s poem attracted nineteenth-century Ro- mantic composers because of its nationalism, its dramatic stories that focused on the nightmarish and irrational, while it attracted twentieth-century composers because of the unusual nature of the music it contains. Yet there is something else that makes the poem particularly attractive to both nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers: namely, the universal appeal of its subject matter, life after death. Artists have always been interested in this topic, but the interest has grown significantly in the last two centuries. In the nineteenth century, Dante’s Commedia appealed to Christians because it depicted a Christian afterworld. In the twentieth century, it appealed to a wider audience, as people of many different reli- gions became more fascinated than ever with life after death. Adapting any text to music, let alone a text as extraordinary as the Commedia, is quite a challenging task. The mechanics of blending words and music is difficult and so is the musical interpretation of the words. The musical piece must present the text filtered through the lens of the composers’ interpretation. This interpretation, in turn, should be considered in light of two issues: the 3 Patric Standford, personal correspondence with author, June 12, 1996. 4 Richard Dyer, “Martino Writes ‘Some Kind of Masterpiece’,” The Boston Evening Globe (May 8, 1975): 40. 5 James Boros, “A Conversation with Donald Martino,” Perspectives of New Music 29 (1991): 212, 237–239. 6 For a list and description/analysis of these works, see Maria Ann Roglieri, Dante and Music: Musical Adaptations of the Commedia from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). ~ 178 ~ https://repository.upenn.edu/bibdant/vol1/iss1/10 2 Roglieri: ‘DANTE’S GREATEST HITS’ Bibliotheca Dantesca, 1 (2018): 177-195 musical potential of the text and the relationship between any music in the text and music that is based on the text. This first issue was addressed with specific reference to Dante in the late nineteenth century when two Italian musicologists, Carlo Arner and Arnaldo Bonaventura, debated the musicality of the poem versus the musical potential of the poem. They argued about whether Dante’s lyrics or Dante’s general themes and stories should be adapted to music and what musical form should be used for any adaptations. They agreed that the music should be in an elevated form and that the composer should be sensitive enough to understand and appreciate Dante’s text, but lamented that few of their contemporary composers were worthy of such a task, being neither prepared to write symphonies nor interested in the musicality of great literature.7 Their contemporaries, of course, were Italian nineteenth- century composers who were well familiar with Dante’s works through their own cultural heritage. What would Arner and Bon- aventura think about the later works by non-Italian composers, most of whom became acquainted with Dante’s work through cir- cumstances such as encountering a translated passage in an anthol- ogy? Despite many later composers’ relative unfamiliarity with Dante’s poem, the resulting musical works were successful because of a fundamental change in musical direction with respect to earlier music. In the nineteenth century, the harmonic and chromatic language was so well established that any text set to music was simply molded to the particular musical forms popular at that time. For example, there were plenty of operas composed in the nineteenth century that focused on the story of one character (Francesca, Dante, Ugolino, Pia, Piccarda, Sordello, Schicchi, Manfredi, Mi- nos, and Sordello), with no nod to the actual Dantean text. Begin- ning in the twentieth century and continuing in the twenty-first century, on the other hand, composers turned to the actual text for inspiration in terms of musical form. Composers in the last two centuries did what they could, given the general impossibility of adapting Dante’s entire text to music. Even though most of the compositions they wrote contain few or no words from the poem, they represent fairly complete adaptations of the poem in terms of structure. Some wordless genres 7 See Arnaldo Bonaventura, Dante e la musica (Livorno: Raffaello Giusti Editore, 1904). See also three articles that appeared in the same issue of the Gazzetta Musicale di Milano 49 (May–June 1894). Two were by Arner: “La musicalità nel Divino Poema” and “Ancora la musicalità del divino Poema,” appearing on pages 330 and 376 respectively. The third article was by Bonaventura, “La musica nella Divina Commedia,” appearing on page 347. ~ 179 ~ Published by ScholarlyCommons, 2018 3 Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies, Vol. 1 [2018], Art. 10 Roglieri: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Adaptations offered a venue for an intimate musical portrayal of Dante’s fear, surprise and wonderment during his journey (small piano pieces) or a highlights approach (symphony because of its length and its multipart structure, which can easily be made to correspond to the Commedia’s own structure). The later twentieth-century adaptations of the entire poem were more varied and included ballet, the- ater arts, string quartets, and electronic music, but still no text. Most of these were composed of three separate pieces, with each piece corresponding to one of the three canticles, performed individually or together in the same concert. The second issue at hand when considering musical adaptations of Dante’s verses is the relationship between any music in the text and music that is based on the text. The more than 300 compositions composed in the last six centuries generally reflect little if anything from Dante’s theoretical ideas about music and less than we might expect from the music that Dante includes in his poem. Dante made music central to Purgatorio and Paradiso and absent in Inferno.

Load more