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Dante's Journey to Polyphony. By Francesco Ciabattoni. (Toronto Italian Studies.) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. [xiii, 218 p. ISBN 9780802096265. $55.] Bibliography, index.
The role of music in Dante's life and his Divine Comedy has fascinated and perplexed generations of scholars. In his Trattatello in laude di Dante XX, Boccaccio writes that Dante was musically literate: "In his youth, he [Dante] delighted himself with music and songs. And he befriended the finest singers and players of his day. He composed many lyrics that were then embellished by pleasant and masterful melodies." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in the second of his introductory sonnets to his 1895 translation, even described the Divine Comedy as music: "What passionate outcry of a soul in pain / Up rose this poem of the earth and air / This medieval miracle of song!" Though no work by Dante was set to music in his lifetime, Nino Pirrotta, the renowned trecento musicologist, published a paper bestowing on Dante the title "Dante, Musicus" (Pirrotta, "Dante 'Musicus': Gothicism, Scholasticism, and Music," Speculum 43, no. 2 [April 1968]: 245).
To this rich scholarship of Dante and music, Francesco Ciabattoni, assistant professor in the Department of French at Dal - housie University, contributes his insightful Dante's Journey to Polyphony, in which his primary focus is "the manner and meaning of musical performance as represented in Dante's poem" (p. 4). Ciabattoni sets out to demonstrate that music is a structural pillar of the Commedia and that it evolves, or morphs, from "infernal music" to monophony in the Purgatorio, to polyphony in the Paradiso. Ciabattoni makes an important contribution to the field of Dante and music by suggesting that many of the vocal performances mentioned by Dante were sung by people singing separate parts. The addition of improvised melodies above sacred melodies was certainly practiced in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy and other parts of Europe, and Ciabattoni applies rather recent scholarship by Timothy McGee and Randall Rosenfeld to support his argument (The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises [New York: Claren - don Press, 1998]). Musical transformation, or the evolution from musical noise to polyphony, as a metaphor for salvation in the Divine Comedy is an imaginative and enticing idea. A smooth...