The importance of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy for Italian and European culture cannot be overestimated. The work is considered to be one of the most important syntheses of late medieval philosophical thought. Due to its popularity, it has played a significant role in standardising the Tuscan dialect and, as a consequence, the Italian language. Sensuous depictions of hell, purgatory, and paradise served as a source of inspiration for numerous painters. The impressive fresco attributed to Giovanni da Modena from the beginning of the 16th century and inspired by the Divine Comedy still amazes visitors to the Bologna Church of San Petronio with its powerful figure of Lucifer, who, surrounded by the circles of hell so meticulously described by Dante, distracts their attention from the heaven depicted in a smaller part of the painting. Excerpts from Inferno and Paradise were also used by the madrigal composers at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Luca Marenzio, Ludovico Balbi and Claudio Merulo (in fact, Dante’s poem has never ceased to inspire composers, for example the vocal works of the contemporary American composer Joanne Metcalf). As in the case of the Bolognese fresco, the most poignant seem to be the works that recall the poet’s musings on the torments of hell. The groans of the damned resound suggestively in the madrigals of Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Giovanni Battista Mosto, who set to music the same excerpt from Inferno. This musical odyssey through the netherworld will be preceded by Stefano Bernardi’s arrangement of Dies irae, a funeral sequence dealing with the Last Judgment, when, according to Christian tradition, tickets are issued for admission to the realms described by Dante. Purgatory, located (supposedly) between Heaven and Earth, will be represented by the penitential motets of the composer-wife murderer Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa. The concert will be crowned by Sanctus from Claudio Monteverdi’s contrapuntal masterpiece, the mass In illo tempore, serving as an illustration of heavenly harmony – but this is for the chosen few only…
Bartłomiej Gembicki