Chapter 6: Dante’s Theater, Dante’s Music

Abstract

This chapter is divided in four sections, the first part, I. Dante’s Theater, beginning with Pietro Alighieri explaining that his father bases the Commedia on Terence’s Comedies and the Roman theater in the round, likewise the “Letter to Can Grande” making this observation; its second section more directly on Terence, including an explanation concerning the Greek logographers and their relation to Greco-Roman drama; its third on liturgical drama based in turn on Terence whom the oblates read in order to learn their conversational Latin, all the while noting that Terence was the freed slave from Africa of the Scipios and their Somnium Scipionis that Cicero penned. The second part is on II. Dante’s Music, particularly discussing the findings for the performance of the Music of the Commedia, that Dante composed seven motets which combine profane vernacular and sacred Latin, reconciling these with St Bernard’s lauda, “Vergina Madre”.

Verse

Verse Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. Publius Terentius Afer, Heautontimorumenos Tu solus peregrinus es Luke 24.18

This chapter will be divided into four sections, the first part, I. Dante’s Theater, beginning with Pietro Alighieri explaining that his father bases the Commedia on Terence’s Comedies and the Roman theater in the round, likewise the Letter to Can Grande making this observation; its second section more directly on Terence, including an explanation concerning the Greek logographers and their relation to Greco-Roman drama; its third on liturgical drama based in turn on Terence whom the oblates read in order to learn their conversational Latin, all the while noting that Terence was the freed slave from Africa of the Scipios and their Somnium Scipionis that Cicero penned. The second part is on II. Dante’s Music. Julian of Norwich spoke of her text as needing to be performed; the same is intensely true of Dante’s Commedia. Its miniatures, especially in BL Egerton 943,¹ and again in Botticelli’s splendid drawings,² bear out their theatricality. Dante’s text is performative and sensual of the right hemisphere, rather than of the abstracted silent reading of the left hemisphere. Though it is art, not life, it at times fractals into itself literal reality and is always representing bodies. It is filled with gestures, with voices, with sounds, and in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, also with music. Paradoxically our modern reading takes place in an abstracted theoretical space, divorced from the body which is seen as distracting. Medieval reading was synesthetic and instead fully embodied; as Richard de Fournival showed in Li Bestiare d’Amours, where his manuscript, and even the 1860 engraved reproduction of it in Celestin Hippeau’s 1860 edition, gives two doors, the eye, the ear, with which to read him.³ This is how to respond to Dante (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Ear and Eye as Door to Text, Li Bestiare d’Amours

Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary

How did I come to Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary to his father’s Commedia? That in itself is a story. I was writing my Berkeley dissertation on pilgrimage in Dante, Langland, and Chaucer and teasing out the fourfold allegoresis, which Dante relates to the Exodus paradigm of going from bondage to freedom, to the singing of the Psalm 113, In exitu Israel de Aegypto,⁴ and which James Joyce reverberates with its unique tonus peregrinus again in Ulysses’ Easter Uprising. Doing so I came across Father Dunstan Tucker, O.S.B.’s essay on “Dante’s Reconciliation in the Purgatorio”,⁵ which places that Psalm in its Easter liturgical context of baptism.⁶ It would have been sung in 3. Florence’s Baptistery (Plates XVII a, b; LXXVIII b; LXXIX b) on Holy Saturday, 27 March 1266, when Dante’s name would have rung out beneath that mosaiced dome, all Florentine babies born since Easter, 1265, and before Easter, 1266, being baptized on that date. Dante, three times, would use Psalm 113’s allegorizing, in Convivio I.1, in Purgatorio II, and in Epistola X. But Father Dunstan Tucker, in making some corrections to his essay, muddled his footnotes. That caused me to try to find his reference to a passage in Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary. But it wasn’t there at the page number he gave. So, seeking to find it, I read the entire Latin commentary through in both exasperation and gratitude.

Dante named his three sons Pietro, Jacopo, and Giovanni, after the three disciples present at the Transfiguration. Pietro Alighieri, born around 1283–1285, when coming of age, was condemned to death with his brothers, and so went to join his father in exile to escape that fate, 6 November 1315. He is documented as a Judge in Verona, in 1332, probably having studied law in Bologna. Around 1355, Moggio de’ Moggi tells us, he recited a now-lost poem of his composing outlining his father’s Commedia in Verona’s Piazza delle Erbe. His brother, Jacopo, also composed a Commentary in verse which is appended to several manuscripts of the Commedia that emanate particularly from Francesco da Barberino’s officina and which carefully note Dante’s death in Ravenna, for instance, in BML Plut.40.11: “Explicit liber comedie Dantis ala/gherij de florentia per eum editus/ sub anno dominice incarnationis/ Millessimo trecentimo. de mense mar/tii. Sole in ariete. Luna nona in libra./ Qui decessit in ciuitate rauenne in an/no dominice incarnationis Millessimo/ trecentesimo uigesimo primo die sanc/crucis de mense septembris anima cu/ius in pace requiescat ammen”. Pietro Alighieri died in Treviso in 1364 and his magnificent tomb is extant there.

There are three versions in Latin of Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary to his father’s poem, the first edited by Vincenzo Nannucci for Lord Vernon, in the edition I read through in its Latin many years ago, finding treasures such as the cataloguing of what would have been his father’s library as including the Classics, Aristotle, Ovid, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Terence, Seneca, and the Patristic and Scholastic authors, Augustine, Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Thomas Aquinas, but also Andreas Cappellanus, De arte honeste amandi,⁷ and Alanus de Insula.

I found most valuable his comment that his father structured the Commedia on the circular Roman theaters such as where Terence’s Comedies were performed, for this validated the use of drama in the Commedia, Terence being the freed African slave whose brilliant plays delighted the Roman Republic of the Scipios and the Roman Empire following upon it, his influence on pedagogy with laughter then being used to teach spoken Latin in medieval convents and monasteries and in Renaissance schoolrooms, Shakespeare’s Globe born from the same knowledge. The acting by the abbots, monks, and oblates of the Officium Pereginorum with its delightful dramatic irony was done in monastic churches in the context of their study of Terence’s laughter-filled Comedies.

Pietro Alighieri tells us:

Libri titulus est: Comoedia Dantis Allegherii; et quare sic vocetur, adverte. Antiquitus in theatro, quod erat area semicircularis, et in ejus medio erat domuncula, quae scena dicebatur, in qua erat pulpitum, et super id ascendebat poeta ut cantor, et sua carmina ut cantiones recitebat, extra vero erant mimi joculatores, carminum pronuntiationem gestu corporis effigiantes per adaptationem ad quemlibet, ex cujus persona ipse poeta loquebatur;… et si tale pulpitum, seu domunculam, ascendebat poeta, qui de more villico caneret, talis cantus dicebatur comoedia…et quod ejus stylus erat in materia incipiente a tristi recitatione et finiente in laetam… Et quod auctor iste ita scribere intendebat, incipiende ab Inferno et finiendo in Paradisum, sic ejus Poema voluit nominari. Item quod poeta in comoedia debet loqui remisse et non alte, ut Terentius in suis comoediis fecit.

[The book’s title is Dante Alighieri’s Comedy, as much as to say that in Antiquity the theatre, which was a semicircular area, and in the midst of it was a small house, called the “Scene”, in which was a pulpit, and the poet would ascend this in order to sing, and his song would be recited, besides which were players, performing the song with gestures, their bodily figures adapted to this, of whom the poet was speaking. And in this pulpit or small house, the poet would ascend, if singing in common speech, a comedy… and this style was for material that began sadly and ended happily… And this author intended writing so, beginning with the Inferno and ending in Paradise, so he wished this Poem to be called this. So the Poet in a comedy must renounce lofty eloquence, and do as Terence did in his Comedies.]

This form of a classical theater, for the acting of Terence’s plays, was still being remembered later (Plate LX a, Josephus Master, BNF, lat 7907, fol. 2^v, b, Terence, Comedies, Lyon, 1493).

Dante’s supposed Letter to Can Grande is in agreement with Pietro Alighieri’s account:

10. The title of the book is: “Begins the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine in birth, not in custom”. In order to understand you need to know that “comedy” comes from komos “village” and oda, which means “song”, whence comedy sort of means “country song”. And comedy is sort of a kind of poetic narration, different from all others. It differs, therefore, from the tragedy, in matter by the fact that tragedy in the beginning is admirable and quiet, in the end or final exit it is smelly and horrible; and it gets its name because of this from tragos, which means “goat”, and oda, sort of like “goat-song”, that is, smelly like a goat, as can be seen in Seneca’s tragedies. But comedy begins with harshness in some thing, whereas its matter ends in a good way, as can be seen by Terence in his Comedies. And thus letter writers are accustomed to say in their salutations in the place of an address “a tragic beginning, a comical end”. They differ also in the way of speaking: the tragedy is elevated and sublime, the comedy loose and humble, as Horace tells us in his Poetria, where he permits now and again comic writers to speak like tragedians and also vice versa. “At times, however, even comedy exalts her voice, and an angry Chremes rants and raves; often, too, in a tragedy Telephus or Peleus utters his sorrow in the language of prose”…And from this it is obvious that the present work is called comedy. And if we look at the matter, in the beginning it is horrible and smelly, because Inferno; in the end it is good, desirable, and graceful, for it is Paradiso; as to the manner of speaking, it is easy and humble, because it is in the vulgar tongue, in which also women communicate. And thus it is obvious why it is called Comedy.⁸

The reference to Chremes’ speech is to Terence’s Heautontumorumenos or “The Self-Tormentor” and its grandiloquent proclamation: “homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto” [I am human, therefore I consider no one an alien to me].

I had first perused the Commentarium in the fine Lord Vernon edition of 1846, printed in hand-set and highly legible type on rag paper, finding it in the library stacks at Berkeley, studying it again in the Società Dantesca Italiana library in Florence, finally purchasing it in two anastatic volumes from India. Pietro continued his work of elucidating his father’s poem, making use of the family library of manuscripts, in two further versions, the final one edited and given me by the tragic scholar Massimiliano Chiamenti who published it with the University of Arizona Press in 2002, using BAV Ottoboniana lat. 2867 as his base text, which is retrievable from the Vatican website.⁹ And then Massimo Seriacopi found the version of the Commentary translated in volgare, in Tuscan Italian, in the Laurentian Library publishing it in two volumes in 2008 and 2009. We collaborated, he turning my edition of the Opere di Brunetto Latino into an Italian acceptable to Italian scholars, and then we worked together on Purgatorio XXI of the Emmaus Peregrini. He gave me copies of his two volumes of Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary in volgare along with a recording of his observations on the importance of that work: Osservazioni sul commento di Pietro Alighieri alla Commedia.¹⁰

Dante’s Terence

Originally published as “Dante’s Terence: Decolonializing the Commedia”, Il Pacioli: “Nostra maggior musa” I maestri della letteratura classica nella Commedia di Dante, ed. John Butcher, pp. 37–58, republished with permission from John Butcher.

It was many years ago that I was on the Board of Directors of the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities and we were voting on funding projects. Such as a perennially popular one by CEOs of corporations to do seminars on Machiavelli’s Prince, read straight, which I would have to explain was instead satire (“Io ho insegnato a’ principi esser tiranni: ma ho anche insegnato a popolo come spegnerli” [I taught princes how to be tyrants: but I also taught the people how to undo them]). When one project for Black Awareness Week was met with utter bewilderment by all around the table, I was sitting on my hands. “What has Black Awareness Week to do with Terence?” everyone scoffed. Finally, it was my turn. I blurted out “But Terence was Black!”, explaining to my colleagues that the productions of Terence’s Adelphoi and Phormio by the Black theater group in Denver, the Eden Theater Company, directed by Lucy Walker, had every right to be funded by us. I explained that Terence influenced Cicero’s concept of “humanitas”, becoming our “Humanities”. That he also gave Dante his poem’s title, the Comedy, the Commedia.

Terence, Publius Terentius Afer, had long ago fascinated me to the extent that I called up the manuscripts of his Comedies as I Eurail passed when researching Brunetto Latino, Birgitta of Sweden, and others in libraries across Europe.¹¹ I had hated Latin in school where we were forced to read Caesar and had cried over my textbook every night, titled “Latin without Tears”. The brilliant classicist and meticulous editor of Greek and Latin authors, A.E. Housman had written, in an address to his own poetry, “Terence, this is stupid stuff”,¹² for his writing about the lower classes, about Shropshire pastorals, in so doing interiorizing the class-conscious, racist, toxic imperialism of classical studies in the British Empire—which got rid of Terence for school children, substituting Caesar instead. It was that substitution that made the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities consider it impossible that a Black theater group could act a Terence comedy, for surely he must be white, as in all the white marble busts of dead classical authors. Even Penguin, which first chose an excellent cover of an Egyptian encaustic portrait, chose to later substitute it with a grotesque white marble mask (Plate LXI a, b, Penguin Terence, Comedies, editions).¹³

But it is time to cease whitewashing and instead to resurrect Terence, the freed Nubian slave, whom Suetonius described as slight, handsome, and “fuscus”,¹⁴ the initial Penguin cover being more accurate, and in whose plays women and slaves come out on top. Before Christianity, the “religion of women and slaves” (his dates are circa 195/185–circa 159 B.C.E.). He is a “Magnificat” writer, a Carnivalesque writer, turning the tables, turning the status quo, upside down, siding with adolescents against their fathers, siding with defenseless poor young pregnant girls, with prostitutes with hearts of gold, with slaves who by their intelligence solve all the familial problems, having “All’s Well that Ends Well” be through their agency, by their kindness. And he does so by a stagecraft as nimble and quick-footed as that in his mirroring slave characters, crafting all the speeches in exquisite though colloquial Latin sung poetry. Consequently his plays were loved and taught and adapted: in convents, as in Hrotswitha’s Comedies, where she combined his plots with Christian tales from the Desert Fathers;¹⁵ in monasteries, such as in liturgical dramas like the Benedictine Officium Peregrinorum performed throughout Europe, at Silos, at Winchester, at Fleury, in Florence,¹⁶ of the Emmaus tale, serving to teach oblates both Latin grammar and Gregorian chant;¹⁷ in Dante’s Commedia; in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales;¹⁸ in the Wakefield Plays’ First and Second Shepherds’ Plays; in Stratford-on-Avon’s Grammar School from which Shakespeare could create his Puck and his Ariel; in that famous line painted on Montaigne’s tower study ceiling in Bordeaux; in Molière’s Tartuffe, acted before Louis XIV, where the quick-thinking servant Dorine saves the day against the machinations of Tartuffe, copied in Frances Trollope’s novel, The Vicar of Wrexhill; and in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, where the wife and servants together outwit their lecherous irascible master and husband.

In Convivio I.v Dante discusses the stable scribal Latinity of dramatists like Terence versus the volatility of the vernacular, an aspect of the two languages also studied by Mikhail Bakhtin¹⁹:

Because of its nobility, for Latin is eternal and incorruptible, while the vernacular is unstable and corruptible. Thus in the ancient Latin comedies and tragedies, which cannot undergo change, we find the same Latin as we have today; this is not the case with the vernacular, which, being fashioned according to one’s own preference, undergoes change. Thus in the cities of Italy, if we care to take a close look, we find that within the last fifty years many words have become obsolete, been born, and been altered; if a short period of time changes language, much more does a greater period change it. Thus I say that if those who departed this life a thousand years ago were to return to their cities, they would believe that they were occupied by foreigners, because the language would be at variance with their own. This will be more fully discussed elsewhere in a book I intend to write, God willing, on Eloquence in the Vernacular.

Barbara Reynolds said that the Vita nova is a poem about poetry.²⁰ That is even more true of the Commedia which pulsates with quotations from and references to other authors, both of the Classical and Biblical past and of Dante’s present, particularly to those poets related to the formation of Guido Cavalcanti’s dolce stil nuovo. The Commedia is also intensely theatrical and elocutionary, a poet’s library crammed with these other “talking books”, their dialogues, which are now performed by us, coming again to life, as we read this dream vision. Jorge Luis Borges reminds us of Joseph Addison in the Spectator, 487, saying the soul in dreams is herself “the Theatre, the Actors, and the Beholder”.²¹ Among those subsumed authors is decidedly the freed African slave, Publius Terentius Afer, who endows the Commedia with its title, and whose patron was the noble Scipio Africanus the Younger, of whom Cicero would write in the Somnium Scipionis, the Commedia’s dream vision prototype.

Terence had gone unnamed in Inferno’s Limbo of the Virtuous Pagans but is introduced first—and first of all as being there—in Purgatorio XXII with the theatrical encountering of Statius with Virgil and Dante, a scene derived from Luke 24 in the Gospel, Luke, perhaps, deriving its dramatic irony from Greco-Roman literature, its epiphany, its tragi-comic anagnorisis. Dante here contrives another listing of Virtuous Pagans, this time at their head, “Terrenzio nostro antico”, whose whereabouts are queried by Statius,

Verse

Verse  Tu dunque, che levato hai il coperchio che m’ascondeva quanto bene i’ dico, mentre che de l‘andarel avén soverchio,  dimmi dov’ è Terrenzio nostro antico, Cecilio e Plauto e Varro, se lo sai: dimmi se son dannati, e in qual vico. [You therefore who have lifted the lid that hid so much of what I say, while we are still climbing, tell me where are our ancient Terence, Cecilius, Plautus and Varro, if you know, tell me if they are condemned and to what place, (Purg XXII.94–99)]

with Virgil answering that Terence is with him in that First Circle of the dark prison (Purg XXII.100–117).

We have evidence of the survival of Terence’s Comedies from the catalogues of manuscripts in major libraries in Italy, France, and England, a presence that would continue after Dante’s time into the Renaissance, being particularly beloved in the manuscripts that swirled about Christine de Pizan and the Duc de Berry,²² through the eighteenth century, before Terence fell out of favor during the era of the global slave trade. Some of these manuscripts, and later printed books, down the centuries, kept alive the visual memory of how these plays were acted with theatrical masks in circular theaters. There must have been countless other manuscripts now lost through wars, fires, and, as school books, from inevitable and intense use, wear and tear.

To get nearer to Dante’s own acquired knowledge of Terence’s Comedies we can consult the text of the Tesoro of his teacher, Brunetto Latino, in the manuscript written out by Dante’s fellow student, Francesco da Barberino, BML Plut.42.19, which quotes from Terence five times and whose name is spelled in three different ways, as Terentio, Terrentino, and Tarrantino:Verse

Verse ¶|Terentio disse. Mentre che’l cuore ee doctoso. elli ua qua ellà. 57^v .        ¶|Terrentino disse ti= ene in te ciò che tu odi più uolontieri che tu non parli. 58^v         . ¶|Terentino dice. |Chi osa di seruire suo padre che fara alli altri chi non perdona a se come perdonera alli altri  66^r              ¶|Tarrentino dice questa uirtù non crede che nessuna cosa uma= na sia strana da lui. e tiene li altrui dan= naggi per suoi profecti.  67^v . ¶|Terentino disse che tutti quelli che an= no auersità è sciagura. e non sanno perche i= stimano che ciò ke l’uomo fa tutto sia per loro male sempre lo pare che l’uomo lo dispetti per loro impotença.   68^r               . ¶|Terren= tino disse peggioriano tosto. quando noi aue= mo lo desiderio  70^rFootnote

https://www.florin.ms/OpereBrunettoLatino.html, Vol II, Tesoro I and II, giving transcriptions of BML, Plut,42.19.

Besides this witnessing from the teacher and guardian, Brunetto Latino, to the orphan Dante following the death of his father,²⁴ we had Dante’s son, Pietro Alighieri, also affirming the importance of Terence’s Comedies to the Commedia, where he had made his argument in two parts: in the first describing the structure of the theater in which Terence’s Comedies were performed as in the form of a semi-circle, this being remembered in later miniatures and engravings, as indeed is Dante’s Commedia with its labyrinthine circles in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, while the poet (Terence/Dante) is as in a pulpit dialoguing with the masked characters of the play; in the second speaking of the lowly, humble style of the comic form, about ordinary people, beginning with difficulties and progressing to joy.

Just as there is a tendency to think of Terence as white, denying his ethnicity, sweeping him under the carpet, there is a similar tendency to ennoble Dante, when Dante himself jokes about falling into the trap of taking pride in his ancestry with Cacciaguida, at which Beatrice as in the Arthurian text gives a warning “Ahem” (Plate LXXVII BL Egerton 932, fol. 154^v, Fallacy of Nobility). In the Christian Guelf world the quest for Ghibelline towers of pride led to bloodshed in the streets and discord in the city, to its tragedy. Dante’s Celestial Rose will be of inclusion, of men with women, the Old with the New, all as equal. And in the face of God he will see mirrored that of Adam, of Everyman, of himself, of us, his readers, as equal with him, being led to that equality through the humility of Beatrice, Lucy, and Mary to Christian Comedy, and away from the alta mia tragedia of Virgil’s lacrimae rerum; to the Gospel rather than the Aeneid, though the Aeneid is given an equal presence, the city of Carthage, of Dido, with its inseminating bees, inseminating this Rose. Dante begins in pride, commits, in the poem’s fiction, all the Seven Deadly Sins, then is purged in humility of them and we with him. He has become our trickster savior, the mischievous slave of the Terentian Comedies who mends the cracks of the world.²⁵ His—and our—Marks of Cain, the seven P’s, are wiped from our brows by the angel wings of his poetry, which embeds also the Song of Songs, the Psalms, Luke’s Gospel, and the humble joyous vernacular Franciscan Laude.

The Logographers

One other facet of classical drama needs to be discussed in relation to Dante, and which is often mentioned by Brunetto Latino in his writings of rhetoric, that of the Logographers, of Athens’ practice not of having lawyers act on one’s behalf but of professional/paid speech writers who would train their clients to give a forensic speech that could convince the agora, the market place being the law court, the forum, of one’s “innocence” despite one’s guilt. Such forensic logographers were Antiphon, Demosthenes, Lysias, Isocrates, and Isaeus. They carefully studied their clients’ psychology and adapted the speech they wrote for them to their characters to make it real-seeming. Which paradoxically led to a sense of hypocrisy and fraudulence. The Sophists ran commercial schools for professionals to be trained in such true-seeming rhetoric, to make the worse appear the better part. Yet the world of the Logographers was closely related to that of the Dramatists, who patterned plays out of the interactions of characters, each with their stylized artificial mask, their persona (which literally means “sound through”, the masks as megaphones in the vast outdoor theaters).²⁶ Cicero, and then Brunetto, on the contrary, trained their readers to recognize false true-seeming rhetoric appealing to the emotions, such as in the speeches by Catiline, Caesar, and Virgil’s Sinon, to those given with integrity and plainness by Cato, Cicero, and Virgil’s Laocoon. Dante crafts Ulysses’ speech from the former negative group, not the latter.

Thus the professional rhetoric of the agora, while true-seeming, was considered false, and that of allegory, away from the agora (allos+agorein), instead as true. Dante, writing Ulysses’ speech is being a logographer, a sophist, a galeotto. He has Ulysses plagiarize and steal Catiline’s suiciding “You were not born to live as beasts”, “Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza” [You were not made to live as beasts, but to follow virtue and knowledge (Inf XXVI.118–120)]. He has Ugolino voice and deny at once, in the subjunctive, his cannibalism of his children, “Poscia, più che ‘l dolor, potè’ digiuno” [Then had hunger more power than grief (Inf XXXIII.75)]. He also sets up the entire Commedia, not as an agora for trying criminals so much as a theater, like that at Epidauros, which served, along with its hospital to Aesculapius, as a center of physical and mental healing, as cultural psychiatry.²⁷

Dante’s Luke

Dante refers to Luke’s Gospel (24,13–15), in a simile, describing the encounter that Virgil and he had with Statius as being like that on the road to Emmaus meeting the risen Christ by Cleopas and another disciple, who is not named («due ex illis») in the Gospel but who was considered in the Middle Ages to be Luke (we recall how Dante likewise does not name himself when citing his poetry in De vulgari Eloquentia),

Verse

Verse   Ed ecco—sì come ne scrive Luca  che Cristo apparve ai due ch’erano in via,  già surto fuor de la sepulcral buca -   ci apparve un’ombra, e dietro a noi venìa,  dal piè guardando la turba che giace;  né ci addemmo di lei, sì parlò pria,   dicendo: «O frati miei, Dio vi déa pace». [And just as Luke writes to us that Christ appeared to the two who were on the way, already risen from the sepulchral cave, a shade appeared to us, and came on behind us, gazing at the prostrate crowd at its feet, nor did we perceive it until it spoke to us, saying, “My brothers, God give you peace”. (Purg XXI. 7–13)]

On the road to Compostela, a pilgrimage road that Brunetto Latino had taken on embassy to Alfonso X el Sabio and that Guido Cavalcanti then took to avoid conflict with Corso Donati, at the Benedictine monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, we see Christ as a pilgrim, beside him Cleopas pointing to the sun and Luke as author/pilgrim who carries the book of his Gospel—which he does not yet understand (Luke 24.16–27), Christ being the unknown Pilgrim with the Compostela cockle shell on his scrip. The music in the Benedictine liturgical drama for the part of Luke cannot be sung by a man, only by a boy, by an oblate whose voice has not yet cracked. This abbey at Silos, like those at Fleury and at Winchester, performed this play.²⁸ In the BAV lat. 4776 manuscript of Dante’s Commedia, at folio 39^r, we see the young immature apprentice Dante as Luke in blue carrying the book of Virgil’s Aeneid, that will turn into his own Gospel Commedia, beside the aged Virgil as Cleophas. They are still in Hell and Christ/Statius has not yet joined them as the Third to their two (Plate LXII Pilgrims at Emmaus, a, Silos Cloister sculpture, b, Dante and Virgil, BAV lat. 4776, fol. 39^r,²⁹ c, d, e, Botticelli’s drawings for Purgatorio XXI).

That meeting with Statius by Virgil and Dante is embedded within the context of the Benedictine drama of the Officium Peregrinorum, such as Dante could have seen enacted at the 21. Badia (Plate XXVIII), adjacent to his 25. childhood home (Plate XXXI), where he had learned the Gregorian chanting in Latin of the Psalms, perhaps he himself before his voice cracked as a boy singing that part of Luke. I have had my students act it at Princeton and Dallas,³⁰ and also we included it in the Musica della Commedia concerts Federico Bardazzi’s Ensemble San Felice performed in Cologne, Graz, Avila, Ravenna, and Florence,³¹ to explain not only Purgatorio XXI, but also the entire Commedia. Botticelli would illustrate this encountering most movingly, dramatically, and joyfully, between 1482 and 1503, while having the pagan poets be exotically garbed like the Greeks who had come to the 1437 Council of Florence (Plate LXII c, d, e).³²

“Sì come ne scriva Luca” (Purg XXI,7), Dante writes of that playful dramatic encountering where Christ as the Stranger, the Other, the Pilgrim, the Third Man, is unrecognized at first by Cleopas and the younger disciple with him, while telling of himself and of all the prophets who had spoken of his coming, Dante here, the youthful Luke, Virgil, the older Cleopas, and Statius, the risen Christ, and their conversation about the Hebrew prophets metamorphosed to Latin and Greek pagan poets.³³ Moreover each encounter by the two with a Third is a shadowy Emmaus encountering, ourselves in God’s image,³⁴ fractalled also among so many poets, the ancient pagan ones we have already discussed, David and Solomon throughout, and also the modern poets among the sinners in Hell (Pier delle Vigne, XIII, Bertran de Born, XXVIII), the repentant in Purgatory (Casella, II, Sordello, VI-VIII, Forese Donati, XXII, Bonagiunta da Lucca, Jacopo da Lentini, Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizelli, XXIV, Arnaut Daniel, XXVI), and the saved in Paradise (Carlo Martello, VIII, Folco of Marseilles, IX, Francis, XI, Dante, XXXIII).

In this way Dante reconciles the “Allegory of the Poets” with the “Allegory of the Theologians” in play, in a liturgical drama that he embeds in his text, he himself becoming the paradigm of the Evangelist Luke, who initially does not understand, but who becomes the disciple who will proclaim Christ’s Resurrection. Vincenzo Placella, writing on anagogy in Dante, discusses the use in Luke’s Gospel where the risen Christ speaks to the disciples—Et incipiens a Moyse et omnibus prophetis interpretabatur illis in omnibus Scripturis, quae de ipso erant (Luke 24.27)—kindling their hearts with new hope, Christ himself being the true Magister, the anagnorisis, ἀναγνώρισις, of the fourfold exegesis of lectio divina, the théia anágnosis, the “Divine Recognition”.³⁵ Elsewhere I have argued that Dante’s major paradigms in both the Vita nova and the Commedia are those of Exodus (in particular of the Exodus in David’s prophetic Psalm 113, sung to its ancient tonus peregrinus by Hebrew Pilgrims at the Temple in Jerusalem), and the tale of the Emmaus Pilgrims in the New Testament’s Gospel of Luke 24, “come ne scriva Luca’ (Purg XXI.7–13).³⁶

This Gospel tale of dramatic irony was typically sung by the Abbot and the Oblates of Benedictine monasteries, to teach them their Gospel, their Latin, their Gregorian chant, as at Winchester, Fleury, Silos, and in Florence. These are sung plays also to be found in the vernacular Florentine manuscripts of the Compagnie dei Laudesi.³⁷ Both iconography and music give Cleophas as Aged, the other Pilgrim on the Road to Emmaus as a Youth, singing in the treble clef, even as the Gospeler Luke, holding the Gospel he will write but who does not yet know the outcome of the story. Neither of them comprehends that the Third who joins them is Christ, who chides them for being fools and slow of heart to believe, then reveals himself in the Eucharist at the secular Inn at Emmaus, not in the sacred Temple in Jerusalem. Similarly Dante has each Third the two encounter, aged Virgil as Cleopas, young Dante as Luke, be a shadowy Christ, even those in Hell, like Pier delle Vigne or Farinata degli Uberti or Ugolino della Gherardesca. All, as Julian of Norwich said, have God’s Word in them, and all having God’s Word in them, shall be, she declares, saved.³⁸ Particularly where their sinning self has enabled the sinning reader to undo our sins, where they serve to save the Commedia’s “Freedom Readers” from the damnation of Virgil’s wrongful guiding into High Tragedy (“alta mia tragedìa”, Inf XX.113).

We see this in the cloister sculpture at Silos on the pilgrim route to Compostela, the two saying to the Third, “Tu solus peregrinus es?” [“Surely you must be a pilgrim and stranger, not to know of the events that have occurred in Jerusalem?”] (Plate LXII a).³⁹ This marvelous mix of folly and wisdom, of dramatic irony, projected back and forth as in tailors’ mirrors, is the game that Luke/Dante play. Within the text, often in apprentice blue and mocked at by Beatrice for being beardless, Dante, like the later Pinocchio, fails his lessons. He had fallen asleep over Virgil’s Aeneid, in which he had read of the Polydorus episode, yet still plucks the bleeding, hissing, sobbing leaves of the suicide Pier delle Vigne’s tree. While outside the text, he is in the red toga that within it his fallible teacher, Virgil as an aged Cleophas, dons. Dante is double, both Author and Pilgrim persona, both magister and schoolboy, both mature and immature. He is Leopard, Lion, and Wolf all in one. Even, in his text, his teachers fail him. Even Dante, teaching us, textually, deliberately, fails us. To teach Truth, Christ is the sole and only Rabbi (Matthew 23.8).

The Emmaus shadows are everywhere. Dante, as his son Pietro tells us, uses the Comedies of the freed African slave Terentius Publius Afer, in which so often one or two characters meet with a third or even fourth at the threshold of their various stage mansions in the round Roman theater, their masks/personae given as the initial list of characters. In Dante’s List of Characters, the Dramatis Personae, we find himself as the young apprentice in the blue of so many manuscript illuminations, side by side with Virgil in his red magisterial toga, even as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice to medieval Virgil as Necromancer.⁴⁰ In this his work echoes with so many other false mentors, such as Pandarus to Troilus, whether in Boccaccio or Chaucer or Shakespeare, as Mephistopheles to Faust, whether in Marlowe or Goethe or Mann, whether as Falstaff to Prince Hal, or Iago to Othello, again in Shakespeare, or as Mozart and Byron’s shared Don Juan, or as Giuseppe/Joseph the carpenter to Pinocchio/Jesus of the Infancy Gospels, the Fairy with Blue Hair as Athena and Beatrice, or as Sherlock Holmes to Dr Watson. Then, with his soul-selling mentor, Dante encounters presumably lost souls, Francesca and Paolo, Farinata and Cavalcanti, Brunetto Latino, Pier delle Vigne, Ulysses, Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, among so many others, all fractals of his own “lost” one. Dante’s text is drama and makes use of dramatic irony. While his use of Psalm 113 as sovrasenso is to save our souls from bondage, we as “Freedom Readers”.

II. Dante’s Music

Dante insists that poetry is sung. He states that “si poesim recte consideremus, que nichil aliud est quam fictio rethorica musicaque posita” [poetry is nothing other than a verbal construct composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music] (DVE II.iv.2). He divides, as does Solomon, his hundred Cantos into Canticles, as the “Song of Songs”, the Shir ha-Shirim, to his Beatrice. Far more than a mere sonnet of fourteen lines! When the Società Dantesca Italiana scholars recorded the Cantos fifty years ago they read them as prose. I recorded Carlo Poli, actor son of contadini from the Mugello who recited them cantastorie, as Dante would have wished.⁴¹ In 2014–2016, Federico Bardazzi’s Ensemble San Felice of musicologists and early music performers further took up my suggestion of researching and producing the music mentioned in the Commedia, taking each reference to what was sung in the text, using the manuscripts of the period for both the sacred and profane pieces, the liturgical music being retrievable, while we used contrafactum for the lost music of Dante’s secular lyrics, matching their metrics to music of the period that has survived, referenced below.⁴²

I had already perceived the juxtaposition of Psalm 113, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto”, and Dante’s secular love lyric, “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona” as a motet, while in the performing we came to see more such motets that Dante had crafted musically into his Song of Songs. These are the seven polyphonic motets in the Commedia which juxtapose and combine in a Bakhtinian way the doubleness of Latin and vernacular, Gregorian chant and profane love lyric.⁴³ And one can even think of those profane love lyrics, such as sung by Casella (Purg II. 106–117), as to Belacqua’s lute (Purg IV.106–135), and of Adam’s bloated belly in Inferno as like a lute (Inf XXXX.49–51), that instrument, the oud, that came from the Islamic world, along with its seductive Averroïsm and Sufism (Canzoniere Palatina, BNCF Banco Rari 217, fol. 58^r).⁴⁴ I then gave this presentation at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, on Dante as Timotheus, in 2015:

Verse

Verse 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, just arrived from Ostia.Footnote

Augustine, Confessions IX.x. Augustine’s mystical discourse with his mother at Ostia centers 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.

In so doing they forget the plain chant of a hundredfold 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’s Ostia. It had been the psalm Hebrew pilgrims sang in Exodus, when coming to Jerusalem and its Temple, before Christ.Footnote

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.

It was particularly used in the Easter Baptism liturgy, which in Florence took place only in the 3. Baptistery (Plate XVII), 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 21. Badia (Plate XXVIII), where he tells us in Vita nova V he saw Beatrice, he would often hear the monks chant this Psalm with its great antiquity, its unique tonus peregrinus, especially embedded in the liturgical Hours of Prayer for Sunday’s Vespers. Dante, three times, used this psalm, basing his pilgrim allegory upon it. 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.Footnote

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. The document is on display in Siena’s Archivio di Stato.

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.Footnote

JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, pp. 145–162, Plate Xa.

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, London, BL Add. 19587, fol. 62^r—which even graphically shows Dante’s baptism by Virgil, the virtuous pagan. 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” (Plate LXIII a, London, BL Harley 978, fol. 11^v, Reading Abbey motet), and in the thirteenth- to early fourteenth-century motets given in the Montpellier H 196 manuscript,Footnote

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.

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, a perception gained from Mikhail Bakhtin and Michael Camille.Footnote

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol, passim.

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.Footnote

‘|Che due cose contrarie quando sono insieme/l’una contra l’altra. elle sono più cognoscenti’ [Tesoro, 6^ra], 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, 72^ra].

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.Footnote

Boethius, De Institutione musica.

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 theater, 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. He does so as well in the music of his Commedia. 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.Footnote

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 color-coded. Also manuscripts of Dante’s Vita nova and those of Provençal lyrics, from which Ezra Pound’s appunti fell to the floor.

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 notes the references to trumpets, drums, and lutes in the Inferno, but generally to vocal music only, save in similes, in Purgatorio and Paradiso. 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. Francesco 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.Footnote

Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, p. 36.

Dante himself notes that the use of “organum” mitigates against the words’ meanings being understood (Purg IX.144–45), unlike the clarity of sung Gregorian chant in stone structures. Boethius next plunges into ratios, proportions, and harmonies.Footnote

Catherine S. Adoyo, “Dante decrypted: Musica universalis in the textual architecture of the ‘Commedia’”, Bibliotheca Dantesca, 1 (2018): 37–69, https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/b846b6ef-8b19-4060-a22b-2d7f8b1d6597/content

III. Dante’s Education Brunetto Latino’s students delighted in composing lyrics that were then set to music, Giovanni Boccaccio tells us in the Trattattello in lauda di Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Bruni likewise in his Vita, studi e costumi di Dante.Footnote

Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattattello in lauda di Dante Alighieri, XX, “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”; Leonardo Bruni, Della vita, studi e costumi di Dante, “Dilettossi di musica e di suoni, e di sua mano egregiamente disegnava; fu ancora scrittore perfetto, ed era la lettera sua magra e lunga e molto corretta, secondo io ho veduto in alcune epistole di sua mano propria scritte”.

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 Florence’s present rebellious teenagers graffitiing their schools. Imagine them, garbed in white, in 39. Piazza Santa Felicita (Plate IX a, b), worshipping the god of Love on a phallic pillar. Imagine them as like the Beatles of Liverpool or Bob Marley, “All you need is Love” and “One love”, at Rock concerts. Florence’s BNCF, 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.Footnote

Il Canzoniere Palatino: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Banco Rari 217, ex Palatino 418, ed. Lino Leonardi.

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 Par IX), as “Tan m’abellis l’amoros pensamen”.¹⁷ Leonardo Bruni in Vita, studi e costumi di Dante lists Guido Guinizelli, Guittone d’Arezzo, Bonagiunta da Lucca.¹⁸ In such canzonieri, whether Gallegos, Catalan, Sicilian, Provençal, Swiss, or Tuscan, with author portraits, we realize we are in an oral culture, where these portraits and their accompanying songs represent their sensed 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. He would have performed them, or had them performed, to the accompaniment of the rounded Arabic lute, the oud, adopted Europe-wide. IV. Dante’s Seven Motets For twenty 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 cantastorie 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’s ancient tonus peregrinus to the ars nova’s polyphony 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 hypertexted musically to the sacred love of the Creation and the Creator, sung in Florence and elsewhere by secular compagnie dei laudesi as at Orsanmichele, Sant’Egidio, and Santo Spirito. In the pairs that follow I shall list some of the music performed in our concerts given in 30. Orsanmichele, Cologne, Graz, Avila, Ravenna, and Florence’s 4. Duomo, this last for the 720th celebration of its foundation at the Virgin’s Nativity, 8 September 1296. With the music we also projected manuscript miniatures and other images related to the text in right-brained sensuality, available on YouTube’s “La Musica della Commedia” Playlist (Plate LXIII b). Hell has no music, just musical instruments, apart from the parodic plagiary of the Templars’ hymn from Venantius Fortunatus, “Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni” (Inf XXXIV.1).Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB7XtVjxXz0&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=2

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 laude. 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 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, the Shir ha-Shirim, is still sung, not spoken.Footnote

https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt3001.htm and https://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.).Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC0p1DfaPsI&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=6

But, immediately, a backsliding Timothean duality is presented, Psalm 113 In exitu Israel de Aegypto’s tonus peregrinus sung in choral unison by a hundredfold pilgrim souls in Purgatorio II.46–48 is 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, Purgatorio 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” (Purg 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, Banco Rari 18)Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-AvJ7UWRII&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=14

/ 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 (Inf 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 from the Venetian Arsenal with singing “Veni Creator Spiritus”.Footnote

JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, “Veni Creator Spiritus”, pp. 73, 83–84.

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” (Purg 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”Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGNtqVGz7pc&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=15

/ Bonagiunta Orbiciani da Lucca/Dante “Donne che avete intelletto d’amore”, Vita nova XIX, contrafactum “Imperauritz del ciutat joyosa”, Llibre Vermeil de Monserrat, XIV C.Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHSTr40Se7k&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=16

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 lyric, also in the Vatican canzoniere,Footnote

BAV, lat 3793, fol. 99^v.

of Dante’s composing, “Donne che avete intelletto d’amore”. Then Bonagiunta speaks of the Sicilian Notaro Jacopo da Lentini and Guittone d’Arezzo as with him, just as they are in the Canzoniere Palatino (Plate LXIV BNCF, Banco Rari 217, a. fol. 25^v, Bonagiunta; b. fol. 18^r, Jacopo da Lentini, c. fol. 2^v, Guittone d’Arezzo, Canzoniere Palatino). 4. Purgatorio XXV.121, XXVI.140–147, “Summae Deus clementiae”Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eTX-6v2fiw&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=17

/ Figure 7 b Arnaut Daniel (BNF 854, fol. 65^r)/ Dante, “Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman”, contrafactum, Thibaut de Navarre, “Dex est ausi comme li pelicans”.Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3sTJJ0RcGk&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=18

In Purgatorio XXV.121 the souls of the lustful, who include the poet Guido Guinizelli, do not sing a psalm, but instead a hymn “Summus Deus clementiae” 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 (Plate LXV a, BNCF, Canzoniere Palatino, Banco Rari 217, fol. 13^v, Guido Guinizelli; b, BNF 854, fol. 65, Arnaut Daniel). 5. Purgatorio XXVII.58,100–108, “Venite, benedicti patris mei”Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwHTvUJsmB8&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=20

/”Sappia qualunque mio nome dimanda”, contrafactum, Alfonso X el Sabio, “Maravillosos miragres”, Cantiga de Santa Maria 272, BNCF Banco Rari 20.Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4un0OSNUSQ&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=21

In Purgatorio XXVII.58 a voice is 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 (Purg 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 18Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN9DU59huyc&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=25

/ Benedictus qui venis/ Manibus o data plena lilias/In te, Domine, speravi, contrafactum, “Ortorium virentium/Virga Yesse/Victime paschali laudes”, Laudario Fiorentino, BNCF Banco Rari 18, Psalm 31Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJODKHZ3f5g&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=26

(Plate LXVI Piero della Francesca, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Arezzo) In Purgatorio XXX the motet, this time, triple, is all 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 (Purg XXX.11,19, 21), followed by Psalm 31 at lines 83–84. We know of Dante’s friendship with Jewish Immanuello 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 a Synagogue.Footnote

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

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 VI.884. It is just possible that this motet is even more complicated, quadruple, virtuoso, 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 liturgyFootnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5hx9Glbt1k&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=32

/ “Voi che’ntendo il terzo ciel movete” (Convivio II, contrafactum, Marchetto da Padua, “Ave regina/Mater innocentiae”).Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93dVA8zy7Jg&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=33

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 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. Indeed in Convivio 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 that 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).Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49RShu1A_3Q&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=11

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 Latino concerning David in the Tesoro. In Dante’s Judæo-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 to be married to another, Beatrice Portinari de’ Bardi, 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, Miserere, which Dante so often intersperses among the pages, first of the Inferno, Canto I.65, then of the Purgatorio, in Cantos V.22–24, XXIII.11, XXXI.29, finally Paradiso, Canto XXXII.12, even disordering its verses doing so in the Purgatorio, 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 Canticles of Cantos. And—in this vein—he 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, Brunetto Latino, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante Alighieri were all members of the Compagnia dei Laudesi di Orsanmichele, and Dante would have been buried in Francis’ garb, or at least the cord with the three knots, 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 (Plate XXVIII g, Filipino, St Bernard’s Vision of the Virgin), who should sing Latin Gregorian plainchant, but who instead sings the magnificent Magnificat paradox in vulgar Italian, “Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio”,Footnote

La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR3XJAOSgtA&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=40

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 di 30. Orsanmichele. His thesis is the sacred Latin Gregorian chanting of his childhood in the 21. Badia, its antithesis, the adolescent secular love lyrics in Italian of the columned 39. Piazza Santa Felicita, their mature synthesis, the laude of the Compagnia dei Laudesi di 30. Orsanmichele. Dante is both Timotheus, breaking all the rules, corrupting us, and the follower of Francis, following Christ. This recalls the sculpture placed by Arnolfo di Cambio above the right 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, Plate XIII c, Arnolfo di Cambio, Dormition of the Virgin).Footnote

Arnolfo alle origini del Rinascimento fiorentino, ed. Enrica Neri Lusanna, pp. 260–261. This is an instance where sculpture, known by Dante, explains his lyric and its music, sight, sound, and touch. Orcagna’s tabernacle in 30. Orsanmichele similarly gives the Dormition of the Virgin, a scene the Master of the Dominican Effigies, connected with Francesco da Barberino, illustrated in an Impruneta manuscript.

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 among Bernard’s Latin words.

Study Questions

Read a Terence play, of which there are six Comedies, preferably in a Loeb edition with the Latin and English on facing pages, to see how young people, both men and women, learned Latin “playfully” in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It is possible for a class to perform the Officium Peregrinorum in Latin Gregorian chant and its text can be retrieved from https://www.umilta.net/peregrinus.html. The two-hour concert of the music Dante mentions in the Commedia is accessible on YouTube as “La Musica della Commedia Playlist”. Think of Dante’s secular lyrics as like those of modern Rock concerts. Discuss multiculturalism in the music of Dante’s period and of our own. Study how his juxtaposition of these with sacred chant creates medieval polyphony.