(b Florence, May or June 1265; d Ravenna, 14 Sept 1321). Italian poet and theorist. Italy’s greatest poet became prominent in the 1280s as a leading member of a group of young poets who were transforming the style and content of the fashionable, elevated love-lyric; later he characterized the achievement of those years as the ‘dolce stil novo’. He included the best of his early poems in his short prose work La vita nuova (c1292–3), the record of his love for Beatrice and his grief at her early death in June 1290. In the mid-1290s he fell in love with Philosophy, personified in his poems as a noble lady, and devoted himself wholeheartedly to the study of logic, ethics, physics, metaphysics and theology – indeed, to almost every branch of medieval science. Simultaneously he began to be active in the political life of the turbulent Florentine republic. He rose to be one of the six Priors in 1300, before suffering exile after a coup d’état by his political opponents in November 1301. He never returned to Florence. In exile he continued to write lyric poetry (88 poems survive) and pursued his philosophical studies, writing several learned prose works. Two of these demand attention: Convivio (c1304–8), a ‘banquet’ of learning written in the vernacular to reach a lay audience, and De vulgari eloquentia (c1305), a Latin work defining the language, style and metrical form proper to the highest reaches of vernacular poetry.
The great work of Dante’s maturity, a narrative poem he called simply Commedia, presents in fictional form a radical reassessment of his involvement in politics and philosophical study. It falls into three more or less equal parts: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is divided into 100 cantos, each of about 140 lines. Perhaps its greatest debt to the medieval art of music lies in the many intricate numerical symmetries that govern its structure, and in what these symbolize; the metre itself, terza rima, rhyming aba, bcb, cdc etc., and linking the hendecasyllabic lines to make a pattern of threes in an unbroken chain, mirrors the greater art of the Three Person Creator. The poem is at once extremely simple and linear, and extremely complex. Over a cantus firmus, represented by the realistic narrative of the journey, Dante wove the equivalent of many polyphonic strands by giving the story an allegorical dimension, by introducing prophecies, flashbacks, digressions and learned discourses, and by spinning a complex web of correspondences and patterns of meaning through a virtually unbroken flow of simile, metaphor and allusions to history, myth and legend. Music is significantly absent in Dante’s Inferno: Hell reverberates with ‘sighs, screams and lamentations’, and ‘different tongues make not sweet harmony but an eternal tumult in the dark air’ (Inferno iii.22–30, set by Luzzaschi). In Purgatorio music plays an important part: on every terrace the souls sing an appropriate hymn or antiphon from the liturgy. However, the emphasis falls on the ‘therapeutic’ power of such music, sung as an act of corporate worship and as part of a rite of expiation. It is in Heaven (or rather in the heavens) that music assumes its proper role: in association with images of the dance, music conveys the order, beauty and bliss (dolcezza is the key term) of eternal beatitude and perfect love, the state men may enjoy when they have been not only redeemed and restored but ‘transhumanized’ (Paradiso i.70, xxx.57) and made divine. No-one who has read Paradiso will lightly misjudge the purely sensuous sweetness of music in Dante’s day. Dante is still unsurpassed in his power to suggest in poetry the impact of great music on the listener, the experience of ecstasy or transport in which everything else is forgotten (e.g. Purgatorio ii.106–20; Paradiso xiv.118–26, xxiii.97–111, 127–9). He declared himself unable to express ‘la dolce sinfonia di Paradiso’ (Paradiso xxi.59), but the reader is left feeling that he too has heard.
Conversely, Dante’s poetry has been poorly served by musicians. No contemporary settings of any of his verse have survived, and the earliest that have date only from the first half of the 16th century (see Einstein). The madrigalists rarely used texts by him. Romantic composers (Liszt, Tchaikovsky: see below) responded with characteristic abandon to the horror of certain scenes and the pathos of tragic encounters in the Inferno, but these are really uncharacteristic of the Commedia as a whole.
Dante’s scattered remarks about the relationship of poetry and music are often quoted, and often misrepresented. ‘Poesis … nichil aliud est quam fictio rethorica musicaque poita’, he wrote in De vulgari eloquentia, II, iv.2. This was wrongly rendered (with an earlier reading of ‘posita’ or ‘composita’ for ‘poita’) as ‘poetry is a rhetorical fiction set to music’, making the musical setting a condition of poetry. A better translation might be: ‘poetry is simply a work of imagination [fictio] composed or made [poita, from Gk. poein] according to the rules of rhetoric and music’. Good prose is rhetorica poita; so the musical organization of words is certainly that which distinguishes poetry from prose. But ‘musica’ is here used both in a precise and limited technical sense (as governing the rules of rhythm) and in a general sense which allowed Dante to speak of his craft as ‘harmonizing words’ (Convivio, II, xiii.23; De vulgari eloquentia, II, viii.5). To bring words into harmony is to organize the sequence of syllables rhythmically and numerically so that they form lines of verse with a fixed number of syllables and certain cadences (musica poita in the technical sense). It is also to temper the harsher and smoother sounds of words (scrupulously defined in De vulgari eloquentia, II, vii.4–6) so that they will combine to form a structure that is pleasing and appropriate to the meaning (De vulgari eloquentia, II, i; Rime ciii.1–2; Inferno xxxii.1–3). Further, it is to bind the lines of verse into groups of three, four or more by rhyme, thus creating the larger metrical units that make up the constituent parts of the stanza in a canzone or ballata, or the quatrains and tercets of a sonnet. Poems can be called rime (‘rhymes’) when rima is used in the broad sense to denote ‘all speech which is governed by numbers and time and ends in rhymed consonances’ (Convivio, IV, ii.12). The sweetness of poetry depends on its armonia so understood. Like music itself, poetry is ‘tutta relativa’ (Convivio, II, xiii.23), and ‘the more beautiful the relationship [proportion], the sweeter is the resultant harmony’; this is why the sweetness of poetry cannot survive translation, since the aural relationship of the parts must inevitably be broken (Convivio, I, vii.14).
There is another sense in which a canzone stanza is musica poita: it has to be constructed so that it can be set to music (‘omnis stantia ad quandam odam recipiendam armonizata est’, De vulgari eloquentia, II, x.2) according to the musical conventions of the day. These were similar to the rules of Meistergesang as explained by Hans Sachs in Act 2 of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, and they required that the stanza be set to two contrasted melodies, of which the first must be repeated (AAB). Hence the stanza had to have two metrically identical pedes with shared rhymes (Ger. Stollen) followed by a metrically distinct sirma with contrasted rhymes (Ger. Abgesang: see Bar form). But it is perfectly clear that, for Dante, the poem already had its own ‘harmony’ and was complete when the poet’s work was done: it did not need a musical setting to exist as a ‘song’.
Madrigal settings of Dante survive by Luzzaschi, Marenzio, Claudio Merulo, Domenico Micheli, G.B. Mosto, Soriano and Pietro Vinci. Later composers’ interest in him seems to have been slight, and only with the onset of the Romantic period did it revive, chiefly with reference to the Francesca da Rimini episode. ‘Nessun maggior dolore’ (Inferno v) is sung under Desdemona’s window by gondoliers in Rossini’s Otello (1816). Mercadante (1830) and Morlacchi (1839) wrote operas called Francesca da Rimini. Donizetti composed a setting of the hymn to Mary (Paradiso xxxiii) for bass and piano, and an opera called Pia de’ Tolomei (1837). Boito and Verdi set Dante texts (Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, 1914, is a setting of a libretto by D’Annunzio based on Boccaccio’s commentary to Dante), and Liszt and Pacini wrote symphonies inspired by his work.
P.V. Mengaldo, ed.: De vulgari eloquentia (Padua, 1968)
G. Petrocchi, ed.: La commedia (secondo l’antica vulgata) (Milan, 1968)
C. Vasoli, ed.: Convivio (Milan, 1988)
GroveO (B. Reynolds)
A. Einstein: ‘Dante, on the Way to the Madrigal’, MQ, xxv (1939), 142–55, 507–9
N. Pirrotta: ‘Due sonetti musicali del secolo XIV’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés (Barcelona, 1958–61), 651–2
N. Pirrotta: ‘Ars Nova e stil nuovo’, RIM, i (1966), 3–19
A. Picchi: ‘La musicalità dantesca nel quadro delle metodologie filosofiche medioevali’, Annali dell’Istituto di studi danteschi, i (1967), 155–94
J.E. Stevens: ‘Dante and Music’, Italian Studies, xxiii (1968), 1–18
R. Monterosso: ‘Musica’, Enciclopedia dantesca, ed. U. Bosco, G. Petrocchi and others (Rome, 1970–78)
F. Bisogni: ‘Precisazioni sul Casella dantesco’, Quadrivium, xii/1 (1971), 81–92
M.S. Elsheikh: ‘I musicisti di Dante (Casella, Lippo, Scochetto) in Nicolò de’ Rossi’, Studi danteschi, xlviii (1971), 153–66
PATRICK BOYDE