ià era 'l
sole a l'orizzonte giunto lo cui meridïan cerchio coverchia
Ierusalèm col suo più alto punto;
'Dante vivo', 1997-2022 © Julia Bolton Holloway, Carlo Poli, Società Dantesca Italiana, Federico Bardazzi, Ensemble San Felice, Richard Holloway, Akita Noek
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DANTE ALIGHIERI
COMMEDIA.
PURGATORIO II
ià era 'l
sole a l'orizzonte giunto
lo cui meridïan cerchio coverchia
Ierusalèm col suo più alto punto;
4 e la
notte, che opposita a lui cerchia,
uscia di Gange fuor con le Bilance,
che le caggion di man quando soverchia;
7 sì che le
bianche e le vermiglie guance,
là dov' i' era, de la bella Aurora
per troppa etate divenivan rance.
10 Noi eravam
lunghesso mare ancora,
come gente che pensa a suo cammino,
che va col cuore e col corpo dimora.
13 Ed ecco,
qual, sorpreso dal mattino,
per li grossi vapor Marte rosseggia
giù nel ponente sovra 'l suol marino,
16 cotal
m'apparve, s'io ancor lo veggia,
un lume per lo mar venir sì ratto,
che 'l muover suo nessun volar pareggia.
19 Dal qual com'
io un poco ebbi ritratto
l'occhio per domandar lo duca mio,
rividil più lucente e maggior fatto.
22 Poi d'ogne
lato ad esso m'appario
un non sapeva che bianco, e di sotto
a poco a poco un altro a lui uscìo.
25 Lo mio
maestro ancor non facea motto,
mentre che i primi bianchi apparver ali;
allor che ben conobbe il galeotto,
28 gridò: «Fa,
fa che le ginocchia cali.
Ecco l'angel di Dio: piega le mani;
omai vedrai di sì fatti officiali.
31 Vedi che
sdegna li argomenti umani,
sì che remo non vuol, né altro velo
che l'ali sue, tra liti sì lontani.
34 Vedi come
l'ha dritte verso 'l cielo,
trattando l'aere con l'etterne penne,
che non si mutan come mortal pelo».
37 Poi, come più
e più verso noi venne
l'uccel divino, più chiaro appariva:
per che l'occhio da presso nol sostenne,
40 ma chinail
giuso; e quei sen venne a riva
con un vasello snelletto e leggero,
tanto che l'acqua nulla ne 'nghiottiva.
43 Da poppa stava
il celestial nocchiero,
tal che faria beato pur descripto;
e più di cento spirti entro sediero.
46 `In exitu
Isräel de Aegypto'
cantavan tutti insieme ad una voce
con quanto di quel salmo è poscia scripto.
49 Poi fece il
segno lor di santa croce;
ond' ei si gittar tutti in su la piaggia:
ed el sen gì, come venne, veloce.
52 La turba che
rimase lì, selvaggia
parea del loco, rimirando intorno
come colui che nove cose assaggia.
55 Da tutte
parti saettava il giorno
lo sol, ch'avea con le saette conte
di mezzo 'l ciel cacciato Capricorno,
58 quando la
nova gente alzò la fronte
ver' noi, dicendo a noi: «Se voi sapete,
mostratene la via di gire al monte».
61 E Virgilio
rispuose: «Voi credete
forse che siamo esperti d'esto loco;
ma noi siam peregrin come voi siete.
64 Dianzi
venimmo, innanzi a voi un poco,
per altra via, che fu sì aspra e forte,
che lo salire omai ne parrà gioco».
67 L'anime, che
si fuor di me accorte,
per lo spirare, ch'i' era ancor vivo,
maravigliando diventaro smorte.
70 E come a
messagger che porta ulivo
tragge la gente per udir novelle,
e di calcar nessun si mostra schivo,
73 così al viso
mio s'affisar quelle
anime fortunate tutte quante,
quasi oblïando d'ire a farsi belle.
76 Io vidi una
di lor trarresi avante
per abbracciarmi con sì grande affetto,
che mosse me a far lo somigliante.
79 Ohi ombre
vane, fuor che ne l'aspetto!
tre volte dietro a lei le mani avvinsi,
e tante mi tornai con esse al petto.
82 Di
maraviglia, credo, mi dipinsi;
per che l'ombra sorrise e si ritrasse,
e io, seguendo lei, oltre mi pinsi.
85 Soavemente
disse ch'io posasse;
allor conobbi chi era, e pregai
che, per parlarmi, un poco s'arrestasse.
88 Rispuosemi:
«Così com' io t'amai
nel mortal corpo, così t'amo sciolta:
però m'arresto; ma tu perché vai?».
91 «Casella mio,
per tornar altra volta
là dov' io son, fo io questo vïaggio»,
diss' io; «ma a te com' è tanta ora tolta?».
94 Ed elli a me:
«Nessun m'è fatto oltraggio,
se quei che leva quando e cui li piace,
più volte m'ha negato esto passaggio;
97 ché di giusto
voler lo suo si face:
veramente da tre mesi elli ha tolto
chi ha voluto intrar, con tutta pace.
100 Ond' io,
ch'era ora a la marina vòlto
dove l'acqua di Tevero s'insala,
benignamente fu' da lui ricolto.
103 A quella
foce ha elli or dritta l'ala,
però che sempre quivi si ricoglie
qual verso Acheronte non si cala».
106 E io: «Se
nuova legge non ti toglie
memoria o uso a l'amoroso canto
che mi solea quetar tutte mie doglie,
109 di ciò ti
piaccia consolare alquanto
l'anima mia, che, con la sua persona
venendo qui, è affannata tanto!».
Londra, British Library, Harley 978, fol. 11v, Reading
Abbey motet
112 `Amor che
ne la mente mi ragiona'
cominciò elli allor sì dolcemente,
che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona.
115 Lo mio
maestro e io e quella gente
ch'eran con lui parevan sì contenti,
come a nessun toccasse altro la mente.
118 Noi eravam
tutti fissi e attenti
a le sue note; ed ecco il veglio onesto
gridando: «Che è ciò, spiriti lenti?
121 qual
negligenza, quale stare è questo?
Correte al monte a spogliarvi lo scoglio
ch'esser non lascia a voi Dio manifesto».
124 Come quando,
cogliendo biado o loglio,
li colombi adunati a la pastura,
queti, sanza mostrar l'usato orgoglio,
127 se cosa
appare ond' elli abbian paura,
subitamente lasciano star l'esca,
perch' assaliti son da maggior cura;
130 così vid' io
quella masnada fresca
lasciar lo canto, e fuggir ver' la costa,
com' om che va, né sa dove rïesca;
133 né la nostra
partita fu men tosta.
Londra, British Library, Yates Thompson 36, fol. 68
DANTE AS TIMOTHEUS:
PURGATORIO II AND THE MUSIC OF THE COMMEDIA
Julia Bolton Holloway
I.
Purgatorio II’s Polyphony: The First Motet of Seven
On the shores of Purgatory Dante and Virgil pause from their pilgrimage to listen to the seductive and vainglorious words of Dante’s own ‘Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona’ sung solo in the dolce stil nuovo of the Tuscan vernacular by his friend Casella.1 In so doing they forget the plain chant of a hundred puritanical pilgrim souls who sang Psalm 113, ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’, to its unique tonus peregrinus, a capella, in unison, disembarking on the mountain island journeying by sea from the Tiber. It had been the psalm Hebrew pilgrims sang in Exodus, when coming to Jerusalem and its Temple, before Christ.2
It was particularly used in the Easter
Baptism liturgy, which in Florence took place only in the
Baptistery, where Dante, as a babe in arms, would have seen
the mosaics of its octagon, narrating the Bible. Then, as a child
growing up by Florence’s Badia, he would often hear the monks
chant this Psalm with its great antiquity, especially embedded
in the liturgical Hours of Prayer for Sunday’s Vespers. Dante, three times,
used this psalm, basing his pilgrim allegory upon it.3
It is the oldest, plainest music in the Commedia.
In contrast to it, these same pilgrim souls
are seduced by Casella’s voice singing solo Dante’s dolce stil nuovo
rhymes, the Commedia’s
newest music, in organum,
in a motet, in polyphony, to the ancient psalm. Documents
exist in Siena’s archives where Casella is fined for singing
in the streets, disturbing the peace.4
The pilgrims are next rudely, shockingly,
interrupted by the harsh cry of stern puritanical Cato in
prose, chiding them for their negligence and bidding them rush
to the mountain, to return immediately to their penitential
pilgrimage.5 Figurally and iconographically, in this scene, Cato is as
Moses, Virgil as Aaron, who permitted the Golden Calf
worshipping, the Psalm being godly, Dante’s lyric, instead, a
Golden Calf, this iconography especially shown in the
miniature to Purgatorio
II in a Neapolitan Commedia
manuscript – which even graphically shows Dante’s baptism by
Virgil, the virtuous pagan.6
It is possible, as in the thirteenth-century
Reading Abbey motet of the bawdy lines of ‘Sumer is icumin
in’, sung simultaneously in a round with the sacred Latin
‘Perspice cristicolae’, and in the thirteenth-early fourteenth
century motets given in the Montpellier H 196 manuscript,7
to put together these two contradictory pieces of music, the
psalm chant, the love lyric, polyphonically. But not
initially. The two are worlds apart. Though that diversity
will be blended
at the end of the Commedia
in a vernacular Franciscan lauda sung as prayer
by a famed Latin-writing allegorist on the Song of Songs of
Solomon, Cistercian St Bernard. Scholars have studied such
obverse/reverse juxtapositions between the bawdy and the
sacred in the macaronic use of the vulgar vernacular and the
sacred Latin in texts, and in medieval manuscript miniatures
and borders, our heritage from Mikhail Bakhtin and Michael
Camille.8 But we also need to do so for medieval
music and its use of motets, especially in Dante’s dolce stil nuovo and
ars nova world of
the Vita nova and
the Commedia.
II. Boethius on Polyphony
Boethius, in De Institutione Musica
based on Pythagorean teaching, in a passage in Doric Greek
condemns Timotheus for inventing polyphonia, for
arrogantly adding extra strings to the harp, polychordia, and for
being vainglorious, Sparta therefore exiling him.9
Then Boethius in exile himself became as Timotheus, using
poetic dialectic in his De
consolatione philosophiae, where his persona progresses
from sonneteering self-pity, in bondage with multiple whores
of the theatre, to the liberty of philosophical wisdom, God’s
Daughter, in a splendid healing palinode. Dante will do the
same, his pilgrim persona
in the Vita nova
journeying jokingly from adulterous lechery to Christian
salvation, in the Commedia
progressing from pagan pride to Christian humility, in both
from folly to wisdom. These works become his Augustinian Confessions, his
Collodian Pinocchio, first wallowing in the eating of stolen
fruit, then converting to Truth. And he does so as well in the
music of his Commedia.
Dante and
Virgil
Luca Signorelli, Orvieto, Fresco
Imola, Bibl. Com. 37, fol 7r
Medieval manuscripts present Dante the
character, the pilgrim, who blunders and sins, within the
text, in blue, as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice to Virgil the
Necromancer, as the medieval world saw Publius Vergilius Maro,10
while outside the textual frame, as wise author, Dante
Alighieri is in doctoral red, in teachers’ robes. In this,
Dante is copying Boethius' schizophrenic split between his
character, the foolish Boethius, and his wise soul,
Philosophia, with Dante himself as both the foolish student in
blue, 'Dante Pilgrim', the wise author in red, 'Dante Auctor'.
Boethius opens his discussion of music in De Institutione musica
with the Pythagorean teaching that we are greatly influenced
sensually and morally by music, which can incite us to
violence or lechery, or which can channel excessive grief into
salus. He divides
music into the harmony of the spheres, then the human music of
the soul, and, last and least, instrumental music. Of the
instruments, stringed lyres with seven strings replicating the
seven spheres, are the highest, wind and percussion
instruments being the lowest, Francesco Ciabattoni in Dante’s Journey to Polyphony noting the references to trumpets, drums and
lutes in the Inferno,
but generally to vocal music only, save in similes, in Purgatorio and Paradiso.11
Timotheus is particularly condemned because he invents not
only polyphony but adds extra strings to the seven of the harp
to a total of eleven, distorting its music which should
replicate that of the seven/ten spheres. Ciabattoni notes that
Pope John XXII likewise condemned the use of polyphony, of
vulgar motets, ‘motetis
vulgaribus’, in his Bull, Docta sanctorum partum,
1324-25 (p. 36). Dante himself notes that the use of ‘organum’
mitigates against the words’ meanings being understood (Purgatorio
IX.144-45), unlike the clarity of sung Gregorian chant in
stone structures. Boethius next plunges into ratios,
proportions and harmonies.
III. Dante’s Education
Guidi Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and
Francesco da Barberino were all students of Brunetto Latino,
who had travelled in Spain and France and who himself wrote a
lauda while
collecting Provençal lyrics. This Boethian-influenced Tesoro manuscript in
the Laurentian Library, which I am currently editing, shows
Brunetto in red teaching Dante, who is in apprentice blue, and
Francesco da Barberino.
Brunetto’s students delighted in composing lyrics that were
then set to music, Boccaccio tells us in Trattattello in lauda di
Dante Alighieri15 Thus we see them in the
context of the dolce
stil nuovo, rebelliously singing and playing musical
accompaniments with their friends, daring each other to break
all Pythagorean rules of decorum. Imagine them as Timotheus.
Imagine them as like the Beatles of Liverpool.
Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale Banco Rari 217’s Canzoniere Palatina
contains both Sicilian and Tuscan lyrics, including ones by
Guido Cavalcanti, with the portraits of their poets, Guittone
d’Arezzo, Notaro Iacomo Lentini, Pier delle Vigne, Guido
Guinizelli, Bonagiunta Urbiciani, and Guido Cavalcanti.16
The De vulgari
eloquentia clusters Dante’s lyrics with those by
‘Arnaldus Danielis, Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcantis’,
giving that by Folquetus (Folco of Marseilles, whom we meet in
Paradiso IX), as
‘Tan m’abellis l’amoros pensamen’.17 Leonardo Bruni
in Vita e costumi di
Dante lists Guido Guinizelli, Guittone d’Arezzo,
Bonagiunta da Lucca.18 In such canzonieri, whether
Sicilian, Provençal, Swiss or Tuscan, with author portraits,
we realise we are in an oral culture, where these portraits
and their accompanying songs represent voices, and which are
echoed again in the Commedia,
save for that of Cavalcanti – whose dolce stil nuovo was
silenced to exile and death by Dante as Prior. From these
Dante initially constructs his Vita nova of love
lyrics with the vida
and razio,
discussing them in De
vulgari eloquentia II and the Convivio, then
recycling several of these lyrics in his Commedia’s motets.
IV. Dante’s Sevenfold Polyphony
For fifteen years in Florence I have worked on a project
called ‘Dante vivo’, after Giovanni Papini's 1933 book title,
seeking to make the education of Dante in Italy and elsewhere
more true to his medieval sensuality and for which I have
placed on the web the entire oral reading of the Commedia by Carlo
Poli, the actor son of contadini
from the Mugello.
In particular, with the music, I found Dante teaches both the
history of music from Psalm 113 to the ars nova of his day,
in Purgatory giving the psalm and hymn music of the liturgical
Offices, then from the Terrestrial Paradise on, the music of
the Mass - and
also that his music maps the geography of his exile, going
from Florence to Verona and Ravenna.
In Florence, for the 750th anniversary of Dante’s
birth, the Ensemble San Felice of Federico Bardazzi and Marco
Di Manno at my suggestion performed the music of Dante’s Commedia, making use
of the manuscripts of the period, the ecclesiastical music of
Florence, Padua, Verona and Ravenna already being carefully
documented, while we performed his secular lyrics, for which
the music has not survived, with contrafactum from
music manuscripts of lyrics in canzonieri and laudari in Tuscan,
Gallegos, Catalan, Provençal,
etc., related to Brunetto’s and Dante’s rich
multicultural mercantile banking and diplomatic ambience and
from which Dante and his fellow poets fashioned their dolce stil nuovo,
just as we find in coeval ecclesiastical music the heady
experimentation of the ars
nova, the defiant use of forbidden polyphonia. St
Francis had already shaped this rich duality with troubadour
lyrics in the vulgar vernacular as contrafactum to the
sacred love of the Creation and the Creator, sung in Florence
and elsewhere by secular compaignie dei laudesi
as at Orsanmichele and Sant’Egidio. In the pairs that follow I
shall list some of the music performed by my esteemed
colleagues in concerts given in Orsanmichele, Cologne, Graz,
Avila, Ravenna and Florence’s Duomo, this last, 8 September
2015, for the celebration of its foundation at the Virgin’s
Nativity, 8 September 1296, some seven centuries ago. With the
music we also projected manuscript miniatures and other images
related to the text in right-brained sensuality, available in
the pedagogic DVD to accompany Marco Romanelli's book.
Hell has no music, just musical instruments,
apart from the parodic plagiary of the Templars’ hymn from
Venantius Fortunatus, Vexilla
regis prodeunt inferni (Inferno XXXIV.1) This
snatch of a hymn, perhaps functioning as if a photographic
negative, cacophonically mingled with groans and cries,
contrasts tragically to the ensuing heaven-seeking plainchant,
polyphony and laud.
We first hear voices raised in melodious song, in Purgatorio II.46, in
a work that is no longer an exilic ‘carmen et error’ (Ovid, Tristia 2/II), but
which becomes a Commedia,
a ‘Cantica Canticorum’ of Solomon, that will henceforth be
filled with songs, both sacred and secular. If you listen to
the Hebrew of the Bible on the Web you will find that the Song
of Songs is still sung, not spoken: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/mp3/t3001.mp3
1. Purgatorio
II.46-48,112, Psalm 113, ‘In exitu Israel de
Aegypto’, ‘tonus peregrinus’|| Casella/Dante, ‘Amor, che
ne la mente mi ragiona’ (Convivio
III, De vulgari
eloquentia II,VI,6, contrafactum, ‘Mariam Matrem
Virginem’, Llibre
Vermeil de Montserrat, XIV C.).
But, immediately, a backsliding Timothean
duality is presented, Psalm 113’s In exitu Israel de
Aegypto’s tonus
peregrinus sung in choral unison by a hundredfold
pilgrim souls in Purgatorio
II.46-48,
juxtaposed to Dante’s thrice-used lyric,
‘Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona’, Convivio III, De vulgari eloquentia II,VI, 6, set to music and sung by Casella solo, as a
motet (II.76-120), the sacred Latin translating the sacred
Hebrew now juxtaposed to the Tuscan vernacular, the centuplum monophony
to solo polyphony, the first, Puritanical in its humility,
antiquity and plainness, the second arrogantly seductive and
new-fangled in its evocation of minstrelsy, of songs sung
before the windows of one’s love, an ‘amoroso canto’ (II.107)
– Siena’s State Archive documents fining Casella for so
disturbing the peace of public space with his serenading.
2. Purgatorio
XIX.7-36,73, ‘Io son dolce Sirena’, contrafactum, ‘Co’ la
Madre del Beato’, Laudario
Fiorentino, BNCF, BR 18)|| Psalm 118, ‘Adhesit pavimento anima
mea’
Dante has already had Ulysses narrate his
‘suicide-bomb video’ shipwreck speech that had killed himself
and all his comrades on the shores of the nuova terra (Inferno XXVI.46-142).
Now we encounter the Siren and her song in Purgatorio XIX.7-36,
that had earlier so threatened Ulysses’ voyage, and which was
also Boethius’ example of the wrongful use of music, in a
dream within the dream of the Commedia. 20
Dante’s Paradiso II.1-18
will open explaining that his poem is a pilgrim ship, the
manuscript illuminations showing the Jerusalem cross upon its
sail, such pilgrim ships setting sail with singing ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’.21
The contrafactum
motet to the Siren’s Song is Psalm 118.25 which is barely
heard at all as it is said by souls expiating their avarice by
clinging to the pavement: ‘Adhesit pavimento anima
mea’ (Purgatorio
XIX.73). And which includes the lines, ‘Averte oculos meos ne
videant vanitatem in via tua vivifica me’. In this
second motet or pairing the psalm follows, instead of
preceding the sinning song.
3. Purgatorio XXIII.10,
XXIV.51, Psalm 50, ‘Labia
mea Domine’|| Bonagiunta Orbiciani/Dante ‘Donne che
avete intelletto d’amore’ Vita nova XIX,
contrafactum ‘Imperauritz del ciutat joyosa’, Llibre Vermeil de
Monserrat, XIV C.
In the circle where gluttony is punished we first hear lines
from David’s Penitential Psalm 50 on opening one’s lips to
proclaim the praise of God, Purgatorio XXIII.10,
his Psalm written to expiate his crimes of adultery and
murder, then the backsliding into the seduction and
celebration of the dolce
stil nuovo, where lips are opened in the praise of
women, rather than of God, where Bonagiunta da Lucca sings
Dante’s Vita nova
and dolce stil nuovo lyric of Dante’s composing, ‘Donne che
avete intelletto d’amore’, Purgatorio XXIV.51,
Jacopo da
Lentini, BNCF, Canzoniere
Palatino, Banco Raro 418
then speaks of the Sicilian Notaro Jacopo da Lentini and the
Aretine Guittone as with him.
4. Purgatorio
XXV.121, XXVI.140-147, Summae
Deus clementiae|| Arnaut Daniel/Dante, ‘Tan m’abellis vostre
cortes deman’, contrafactum, Thibaut de Navarre, ‘Dex
est ausi comme li pelicans’.
In Purgatorio
XXV.121 the souls of the lustful,
Guido Guinizelli, BNCF, Canzoniere
Palatino, Banco Raro 418
who include the poet Guido Guinizelli, do not sing a psalm,
but instead a hymn
Arnaut Daniel,
Bibliothèque Nationale, BnF ms. 854 fol. 65
to which the contrafactum becomes
Arnaut Daniel’s Provençal lyric, Purgatorio
XXVI.140-147, in actuality again composed by the virtuoso
Dante, showing off his not inconsiderable skills, and for
which he plagiarizes not Arnaut Daniel but Folquet da
Marsiglia’s and Berenguer de Palou’s ‘Tan m’abellis’. As
author, Dante assumes the masks of many other authors, as poet
that of other poets, purloining from them their poetry
throughout his pages.
5. Purgatorio XXVII.8,
58,100-108, 'Beati mundo corde', Venite, benedicti patris
mei|| ‘Sappia qualunque mio nome dimanda’, contrafactum,
Alfonso el Sabio, ‘Maravillosos miragres’, Cantiga de Santa Maria
272, BNCF BR 14.
In Purgatorio
XXVII.58 angelic voices are heard singing, announcing
eventide. Then Dante falls asleep and dreams of a singer who
is Lia with Rachel, as a precursor to Matelda with Beatrice,
the active versus the contemplative life (Purgatorio
XXVII.100-108). Apart from the Siren, also heard in a dream,
this is the first woman’s song we hear, Lia/Matelda
functioning as the precursor, like John the Baptist, to
Rachel/Beatrice as Christ. We recall Dante had already played
such a transvestite game in the Vita nova, where
Cavalcanti’s Giovanna is the ‘prima vera’, the herald to
Beatrice. We are
entering the realm of the Blessed, the expiation from sin
being almost fulfilled.
6.
Purgatorio
XXX.11,19,21,83-84, Veni
de Libano, sponsa mea, contrafactum, ‘Peccatrice
nominato Magdalena da Dio amata’, Laudario Fiorentino,
BNCF BR 18|| Benedictus
qui venis|| Manibus
o data plena lilias ||In te, Domine, speravi,
contrafactum, ‘Ortorium virentium/Virga Yesse/Victime paschali
laudes’, Laudario
Fiorentino, BNCF BR 18, Psalm 31
In Purgatorio XXX the motet, this
time, triple, perhaps even quadruple, is entirely in Latin,
from the Song of
Songs, the Gospel (Luke 19, 38; Matthew 21, 5 and 9) and from Virgil’s Aeneid, the Jewish,
the Christian and the pagan Roman, all together (XXX.11,19,
21), followed by Psalm 31 at lines 83-84. We know of Dante’s
friendship with Jewish Emmanuel Romano at Verona, likewise a
composer of polyphony, and thus that he could also know that
the ‘Benedictus qui venis’ sung at Palm Sunday at Jesus’ entry
into Jerusalem, comparing him to David, derives from the
wedding song sung at a bridegroom’s entry into Synagogue.22
Here we have
Beatrice being greeted as if Bathsheba, and the Queen of
Sheba, Dante being greeted as if David and as if Solomon,
while the Aeneid
recalls the lines about the funeral of Marcellus over which
his uncle Caesar Augustus wept and Octavia fainted on hearing
Virgil chant them in Rome, Aeneid 6/VI.884. It is just possible that this
motet is even more complicated, quadruple, and that its burden
is Psalm 31. For in the same canto we find the angels singing,
‘In te, Domine, speravi’,
until they come to the lines of ‘pedes meos’ (Purgatorio XXX.82-84,
Psalm 31,1-8).
7. Paradiso VIII.29/37,
Gloria/ Agios, O Theos,
Ravenna liturgy|| ‘Voi che’ntendo il terzo ciel movete’ (Convivio II,
contrafactum, Marchetto da Padova, Ave regina/Mater
innocentiae)
In Paradiso
VIII.37, we again meet a gathering of poets, Dante
encountering his dead friend Carlo Martello of Anjou, King of
Hungary, and brother to Franciscan St Louis of Toulouse, the
motet combining ‘Hosanna’, here sung in its Greek form by the
Ensemble San Felice, and Dante’s own famous lyric ‘Voi che
‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’, sung here by a saintly king,
in a conversation that will be followed by discourse of
Sordello and Folco (Folchetto) of Marseilles in Paradiso IX. The
third sphere is that of Venus and thus evokes the singing of canti amorosi;
however, it is also St Paul’s vision in which he was caught up
into the third heaven, his conversion from his old Saul self
to his new.23 Indeed in Convivio 2/II, first
giving this lyric, Dante had written of allegory as the truth
hidden beneath a beautiful lie and how Psalm 113 gave both the
carnal sense and the allegorical, of the literal history, of
the Exodus of Israel from Egypt, but also how the soul freed
from sin is made holy and free.
The Commedia has
other uses of music apart from these seven motets. Among them
the most lovely weaving together of the three and four Graces,
the Christian and Pagan Virtues, singing Psalm 78, in Purgatorio
XXXIII.1-3, that is so particularly poignant following the
Loss of the Jerusalem Kingdom: Deus venerunt gentes. Beatrice’s
death in the Vita nova,
8 June 1290, had coincided with the loss of the Jerusalem
Kingdom, 28 May 1291, from which Dante poetically constructs
the new Jerusalem as a Florence/Rome of penitential
pilgrimage. It is a scene which Botticelli will still be
echoing in his ‘Primavera’, just as his ‘Birth of Venus’
resurrected the dead Simonetta Vespucci. When I heard this
Psalm sung alternatim
by the three and the four women’s voices of the Ensemble San
Felice in Orsanmichele it
was as if we were in the presence of the Music of the Spheres,
as if Amphion’s ten-stringed lyre and David’s ten-stringed
harp, converted back to Pythagoras’ seven-stringed lyre, were
a’building the new Jerusalem, a new Florence, though she was
born out of the sorrows of the old, even as a new Thebes over
whom Niobe mourned.
Another is where the souls on Purgatorio XI.1-5’s
Terrace of Pride sing the Pater noster
vulgarized into Italian as a Franciscan canticle, a Franciscan
lauda, ‘O Padre nostro, che nei cieli stai . . . laudato sia
il tuo nome. . . da ogni creatura’, the mortals’ song
mirror-reflecting that of angels chanting Osanna (10-12).24
V. From Seven to Ten
To the classical dictate of the strict limit of seven strings
to the lyre, resonating with the seven heavenly spheres, there
was, however, the concept that David’s harp had ten strings
signifying the Ten Commandments given to man by God, a concept
taught to Dante by Brunetto concerning David in the Tesoro.25
In Dante’s Judaeo-Christian culture, David, Moses and God with
their ten-stringed harp, their Ten Commandments, trump
Pythagoras’s monophonic seven, while condemning Timotheus’
excessive eleven. Timotheus’ name, itself, means that ‘fear of
God’ which is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 1.7, 9,10,
Psalm 111,10).
Who authors the music of Dante’s Commedia? Certainly
Dante composes the amorosi
canti, initially sung to a woman married to another,
Beatrice Portinari, thus aligning these with the Siren’s song
of lust. In this he is like another composer of music, the
shepherd boy who became King David, who lusted for Bathsheba,
and who composed his psalm of penance to God, Psalm 50, which
Dante so often intersperses among the pages of the Purgatorio, in Cantos
5, 23, and 31 (V.22-24,
XXIII.11, XXXI.29), even disordering its verses doing so, as sin
itself is a disordering of the flesh, causing it to shadow and
astonish the shades who are souls. In this he is also like
David’s sinning son, King Solomon, ‘like father, like son’,
who writes the Song of Songs to the Queen of Sheba, the
Canticle of Cantos. And – in this vein – he next assumes the
masks and voices of his coeval lyric poets who shaped the
school of the dolce
stil nuovo – with the joke of the much-fined catawauling
Casella singing Dante’s own ‘Amor ne la mente mi
ragiona’.
But there is another voice, that of St Francis, who turns
sacred Latin into Italian troubadour lyrics, but in praise of
God, Christ, and Mary. Dante was a Franciscan tertiary and was
buried in Francis’ garb at the church of San Francesco in
Ravenna. Dante used the form of the Franciscan lauda in Purgatorio XI for
the words Christ taught us to pray, the ‘Our Father’, the
‘Padre nostro’.
And he again uses Francis’ form of vernacular sung praise, now
to the Virgin Mary, in Paradiso
XXXIII, into the mouth of the white-clad Latin-writing
Cistercian St Bernard, commentator to Solomon’s Song of Songs,
Filippino, St Bernard, Badia Fiorentina
who should sing Gregorian plainchant, but who
instead sings the magnificent Magnificat paradox, ‘Vergine Madre, figlia del
tuo figlio’,
a Franciscan lauda in Italian,
such as were sung by the Florentine laity, by women and
children unlearned in Latin, in their compagnia dei laudesi,
particularly at Orsanmichele. Nor should we forget that Dante
as co-member with Giotto of the Arte dei medici e speziali
shared their stemma of the Madonna and Child. Dante is both
Timotheus, breaking all the rules, corrupting us, and the
follower of Francis, following Christ, the lay singer singing
laude to Mary.26
Arnolfo di Cambio, Dormition of
the Virgin, Museo Opera del Duomo
This recalls the sculpture placed by Arnolfo
di Cambio above the left entrance to Santa Reparata of the
Dormition of the Virgin where Christ compassionately carries
aloft to heaven the soul of his mother, sculpted with the
anatomical boning of a little girl child, the ‘Daughter of her
Son’, Wisdom, who plays at God’s side at the Creation of the
world (Proverbs 8, 22-36).27 Timotheus/David/Solomon/Paul/Boethius/
Dante have redeemed themselves in redeeming us their readers
and hearers. Thus the discordia
concors of the Commedia
is resolved – humbly and anonymously. Dante here, for
once, does not boast proudly of his own exquisite virtuoso
composition - which
is nowhere found amongst Bernard’s Latin words.
NOTES
In my 2013 University of Pennsylvania paper,
‘Piccarda: Monasticism and Neuro-Humanities ‘, I had already called
for performing Dante and for studying him in a right, rather
than left, brain context, with sound and colour, music and
image. Right brain constructions are complex, yoke contraries,
as in motets, and create antiphonal, symmetric, enveloping,
chiastic structures, as in Gothic vaulting; left brain methods
are linear and analytical, in architecture making use of
simplistic lintel and post boxes, and are overly blunt and
superficial when applied to medieval masterworks.
1 Purgatorio II.112; Convivio III; De vulgari eloquentia
II.VI.6. Augustine, Confessions IX.x,
gives his mystical discourse with his mother at Ostia centring
on their arriving at a mutual and global silence. At her
death, chapter xi, a psalm is sung. While Dante has Casella
disturb the holy island mountain with lecherous song of
Dante’s own composing, until Cato breaks its Sirenic spell.
Eric McLuhan, Cynic Satire, Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, building on Mihail
Bakhtin's study of Dosteivsky, has useful observations that
can be related, as well, to Dante, on the polyphonic mixture
of styles and voices.
2 Mattias Lundberg, Tonus Peregrinus: The
History of a Psalm Tone; Dunstan J. Tucker, O.S.B., ‘
‘In Exitu Israel de Aegypto’: The Divine Comedy in The
Light of the Easter Liturgy’, Benedictine Review
11:1 (1960) 43-61; Robert Hollander, ‘Purgatorio II: Cato's
Rebuke and Dante's scoglio,’
Italica 52 (1975)
348-363.
3 Convivio II.I.6; Purgatorio II; Epistola XIII.7.
4 Nicolino
Applauso observes that Casella is fined, 13 July 1282,
Biccherna 84 c. 1r, Archivio di Stato di Siena: ‘Casella
homine curiae quia fuit inventus de nocte post tertium sonum
campanae Comunis’, ‘‘S’i fosse foco ardere’ il mondo’:
L’esilio e la politica nella poesia di Cecco Angiolieri’, Letteratura Italiana
Antica, p. 226.
5 Purgatorio
II.120-133. Dante’s teacher Brunetto Latino, had quoted Cato:
‘¶|Cato dice. Jra impedisce l'animo/ke non può giudicare lo
uero’ [Tesoro,
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana 42.19, fol. 53vb].
Here Dante, jokingly, has Cato exhibit the rage he had spoken
against, fulfilling Brunetto’s further statement concerning
both Cato and Augustine: ‘|Cato
disse/ciò che tu biasimi/ti guarda di fare. che laida cosa è/quando
la colpa cade sopra lui. ¶|Agustino dice. Bene dire. e male operare/non
è altro/che se con sua boce dannare’ [Tesoro, 54ra].
6 British Library Additional 19587, folio 62;
Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and the
Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer, pp.
145-162, Plate Xa.
7 British Library, Harley
978, folio 11v; Fernand Mossé, Handbook of Middle
English, Plate II, pp. 201-202, 369; Yvonne Rokseth, Polyphonies du XIIIe
siècle: Le manuscript H 196 de la faculté de médicine de
Montpellier, 4 vols, passim.
8 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World; Michael
Camille, The
Gothic Idol, passim. Dante Alighieri’s teacher, Brunetto Latino,
himself a composer of a Francescian lauda and cognisant
of Gallegos and Provençal lyrics, expounded this dialectic in
his Tesoro, saying ‘This book teaches
that to learn virtue one must also study vice, in order to
follow one and eschew the other, Aristotle saying that the
same teaching is through two such contraries’ ‘|Che
due cose contrarie quando sono insieme/l'una contra l'altra.
elle sono più cognoscenti’ [Tesoro, 6ra], and ‘I|N questo libro
ci ae mostrato el mastro L’insegnamenti de le uirtù e de
uitij. L’uno per operare. e l’altro per schifare. che
questa e la cagione per
che l’uomo de sapere
bene e male. |Et tutto chello libro parli più de le uirtù ke
de uitij. non pertanto la oue lo bene sia comandato a farlo.
secondo che aristotile dice. |Vno medesimo insegnamento è in due
contrarie cose [Tesoro,
72ra].
9 Boethius, De Institutione musica. Once I called up a manuscript of the De Musica in Verona’s
Biblioteca Capitolare to find its complex visual images of
these harmonies gloriously colour-coded. Alongside manuscripts
of Dante’s Vita nova
and those of Provençal lyrics, from which Ezra Pound’s appunti fell to the
floor. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius leaves that
Pythagorean work, the De
Musica, unfinished, being imprisoned in exile in Pavia
in 523, awaiting his 524 execution, upon which he subsumes all
its theory into the game Philosophia and he play of the wrong
and right uses of music, the wrong being the lecherous music
of the whores of the theatre, the canti amorosi, into
which Boethius’ ‘selfie’ has plunged and wallowing in
self-pity, and the right use of music being Philosophia’s
which balances and heals his soul to heavenly harmonies;
though she seems to him at first to be a punishing Moses, a
condemning Cato. She is his soul, his better half, calling him
back to reason and to wisdom, instead of to the Sirens’ lust
and Circe’s lethargy.
10 Domenico
Comparetti, Virgilio
nel Medio Evo, passim.
11 Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to
Polyphony, pp. 48-66. Dante’s Hell is replete with musical
instruments, particularly those connected with war violence,
trumpets, bells, drums, bagpipes (Inferno XXII.7-10),
and also to the obscene shape of the new-fangled Saracenic
lute forced to sound like a drum (XXX.49,103), most of the
other references being to the Apocalyptic Trump of Doomsday, a
list reminding one of Bosch’s scenes of Hell.
12 Medieval Commedia commentaries
and Leonardo Bruni’s Vita
e costume di Dante note that Brunetto Latino was Dante’s
teacher, that he became the orphan boy’s guardian, and that
Dante’s fellow students with him were Guido Cavalcanti and
Francesco da Barberino. We know from the archives in Fiesole
that Brunetto’s father and brother were notarii to the
Diocesan Bishops, including Filippo da Perusgia, the
Franciscan who journeyed to Constantinople in 1279, and that
traditionally notaries trained their sons in this skill,
preserving, doing so, classical learning. Vittorio Imbriani,
'Dimostrazione che Brunetto Latini non fu maestro di Dante', Giornale
napoletano di filosofia e lettere. A VII (1878). 1-24,
169, 198; rpt. as 'Che Brunetto Latini non fu maestro di
Dante', StD, 1891, pp. 335-80. Francesco
Novati, Le
Epistole. Conferenza letta da Francesco Novati nella Sala di
Dante in Orsanmichele, 1905, pp.
7-14; 'Il Notaio nella vita e nella letteratura italiana delle
origini', Freschi e minii del Dugento, 1925, pp. 243-64,
269-76; challenges Imbriani by demonstrating Brunetto educated
Dante.
13 In 1260, at the time of Montaperti’s Battle,
Brunetto as the youthful Chancellor of Florence, had been sent
on embassy to Alfonso el Sabio in Seville. There he also
encountered Arabic learning, which preserved Greek learning
largely lost to the West. Sentence of exile being proclaimed
against his family, Brunetto next journeyed to Montpellier and
Arras and earned his keep as notary of Florence’s Guelf
government in exile, while at the same time producing his Tesoretto, dedicated
to Alfonso el Sabio, and Li Livres dou Tresor,
dedicated to Charles of Anjou. In the latter he plays the role
of Aristotle who teaches a Charles of Anjou in the role of
joking Alexander. In this text he also consciously quarries
Boethius’ pedagogy. *On
his return from exile in Florence, Brunetto oversaw the
production of the Tesoro
in Florentine Italian by his students, one manuscript of which
is written and copiously illustrated by Francesco da Barberino
(Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 42.19, and which even
portrays Brunetto with his students, one of them Dante with
the Tesoro in his
lap. Only one Li Livres
dou tresor manuscript exists in Florence, while a
plethora of the Tesoretto
and the Tesoro
manuscripts do so in Italian. It is clear that this was
Dante’s version, his education. Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales:
Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, passim.
14 Brunetto’s manuscripts often also contain
Provençal lyrics, he exchanges a Tresor, now in the
Escorial, for
Alfonso el Sabio’s Las
Cantigas de Santa Maria given to Florence, and he
himself writes a Franciscan lauda for a Florentine compagnia dei laudesi.
Provençal
poems in Brunetto Latino MSS: Li Livres dou Tresor: Torino,
Biblioteca Nazionale, L.II.18; Fiore di filosofi e di
molti savi, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di
Firenze, Conv. Soppr. F.4.766.
Li Livres dou
Tresor, Madrid, Escorial L.II.3; Alfonso el Sabio, Las Cantigas de Santa
Maria, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di
Firenze, Banco Rari 20. ‘Maestro
latino’, Lauda, in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di
Firenze, Palatino 168, fols. 34v-37r, Twice-Told Tales, pp.
504-509.
15 Boccaccio,
Trattattello in lauda di
Dante Alighieri, ‘Sommamente si dilettò in suoni e in
canti nella sua giovanezza, e a ciascuno che a que’ tempi era
ottimo cantatore o sonatore fu amico e ebbe sua usanza; e
assai cose, da questo diletto tirato compose, le quali di
piacevole e maestrevole nota a questi cotali facea rivestire’.
16 Il
Canzoniere Palatino: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di
Firenze, Banco Rari 217, ex Palatino 418, ed. Lino
Leonardi.
17 Dante
Alighieri, De vulgari
eloquentia II.
18 Leonardo
Bruni Aretino, Vita e
costume di Dante, ‘Cominciossi
a dire in rima, secondo scrive Dante, innanzi a lui circa anni
centocinquanta; e furono i principi in Italia Guido
Guinizzelli bolognese, e Guittone cavaliere Gaudente d'Arezzo,
e Bonagiunta da Lucca, e Guido da Messina, i quali tutti Dante
di gran lunga soverchiò di sentenze, e di politezza, e
d'eleganza, e di leggiadria in tanto, che è opinione di chi
intende, che non sarà mai uomo che Dante vantaggi in dire in
rima.’
19 We remember medieval, Renaissance and modern
jokes, Chaucer’s Miller and his bagpipes leading Chaucer’s
bawdry to Canterbury, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale lone
Puritan who ‘sings psalms to horn-pipes’, and Hardy’s Far from the Madding
Crowd’s ‘And ‘a can play the peanner, so ‘tis said. Can
play so clever that ‘a can make a psalm tune sound as well as
the merriest loose song a man can wish for’: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ‘A
baggepipe wel koude he blowe and sowne/And therewithal he
brought us oute of toune’, The Riverside Chaucer,
ed. Larry D. Benson, General Prologue, lines 565-566, p. 32; William
Shakespeare, The
Winter’s Tale, IV.iii.40.50, ’but one puritan
amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes’, The Complete Works of
Shakespeare, ed. Hardin Craig and David Bevington, p.
1233; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding
Crowd, pp. 92-93.
20 Ernest Jones in a footnote to his Hamlet and Oedipus
states that the play within the play, like the dream within
the dream, is that which the dreamer wishes were not so but
which is, p. 99. In questing manuscripts of St Birgitta of
Sweden in her double monasteries throughout Europe I came
across one in Munich written for Brigittine monks on the
problem of ‘wet dreams’ and could not help smiling remembering
when I taught for Franciscans in Quincy, of a novice and his
water bed, pinning outside his Friary door a cartoon of a
customer returning his water mattress saying to the salesman,
‘It gives me wet dreams’! Again I recall a story, of a
seminary student in Milan tasting the fruit of his first
prostitute, being told by his rector, ‘Amato, no fruit for a
week. You have had enough of it.’
21 Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book,
‘Veni Creator Spiritus’, pp. 73, 83-84.
22 Immanuello
Romano, L’Inferno e Il
Paradiso, ed. Giorgio Battistoni; Giorgio Battistoni,
Verona, ‘Il Libro della
Scala, Dante Alighieri, La Commedia, e
Immanuello Romano, L'Inferno
e il Paradiso’, The City and the Book International
Conference II, The Manuscript, The Illumination, Accademia
delle Arte del Disegno, Via Orsanmichele 4, Florence, 4-7
September 2002, http://www.florin.ms/beth3.html
23 Paul, ‘Boasting is necessary, though it is
not profitable; but I will go on to visions and revelations of
the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago--
whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not
know, God knows-- such a man was caught up to the third
heaven. And I know how such a man-- whether in the body or
apart from the body I do not know, God knows—‘, 2 Corinthians
12. 1-3.
24 Andrea Della Robbia’s Santa Croce
sculpture shaped from Adam’s clay but glazed with sky blue, of
Jesus, as God-Man, praying this prayer to God: I Della Robbia e l’arte
nuova’ della scultura invetriata, ed., Giancarlo
Gentilini, pp. 202-203.
Andrea Della
Robbia, ‘Padre nostro’, Santa Croce
25 ‘|Ma dauid
profetoe fuori di queste iiij. maniere |Che egli profetoe
per somma interpretatione di dio. e di sancto
spirito. ke'l insegno dire/tutta la natiuitade di xpo.
Che elli scoprio quello/ke li
altri profeti aueuano detto copertamente.
secondo l'uomo puote uedere nel suo libro. ke appellato
salterio. in sembiança d'uno stormento/chiamato altressi
saltero. lo quale a. x. uoci. che significano. x. Comandamenti
de la legge. che dio die a moyse. El saltero ne parla molto di
ciò. in .Cl. salmi che vi sono’ [Tesoro, fol. 12vb].
26 Marco Grimaldi,
‘L’incredultià di Guido Cavalcanti’, «Filologia e Critica», a.
XXXVIII 2013, pp. 3-32. Brunetto Latino, who himself wrote a
magnificent lauda
to the Virgin, says in the Tesoro:
Et sappiate
che la nostra donna moriò al secolo corporalmente. e
portarolla li apostoli a seppelire ne la valle di iosaphat.
faciendo si grandi canti li angeli in cielo ke
non si potrebe ne dire ne contare. |Et quel canto
udirono li apostoli. e molti altri per l'uniuerso mondo. |Ma poi chella fu
seppellita. al terço dì li apostoli non ui trouaro el
corpo suo. |Onde douemo credere che domenedio la resuscito. et
è collui ne la gloria di paradiso [Tesoro, fol. 15rb].
27 Arnolfo alle origini del
Rinascimento fiorentino, ed., Enrica Neri Lusanna, pp.
260-261.
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