Dante and Music: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Harmony in the Comedy
Dante and Music: An Introduction
Michelangelo Zaccarello
During the seven-hundredth-anniversary celebrations of Dante, a cluster of essays in Textual Cultures explores one of the most intriguing interdisciplinary issues connected to the poet: the role of music. Within the semantic and poetic landscape of early Italian lyric, music stands as a constant point of reference. In Dante’s own linguistic world, metaphors drawn from music appear often. While the language of Inferno has sometimes been described through categories of anti-music and disharmony, musical imagery becomes increasingly prominent in the second and third parts of the Comedy. The song of Casella in Purgatorio (canto II) is frequently seen as the entry point to a revitalized function of singing and music, culminating in Paradiso, where more detailed references to technical matters of music and harmony appear (for instance, in discussions of the Heaven of the Sun).
Yet the extent to which music and its vocabulary are essential for interpreting the third cantica remains a complex question. While some have analyzed the verbal harmony (or lack thereof) in Paradiso, a proper methodological approach to this well-discussed topic demands genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship and direct familiarity with the technical aspects involved.
The authors in this section bring strong backgrounds in musicology and the intricate relationship between poetry and music. Francesco Ciabattoni wrote what is arguably the most important book on music’s role in the Comedy; he has also studied the lyrics of Italian singer-songwriters and coordinates a website dedicated to that study. Maria Clotilde Camboni, twice a Marie Curie Skłodowska Fellow in Medieval Studies, has published widely on the connections between music and verse in the Romance languages during the Middle Ages—both in terms of metrics and musicality as well as actual sung performance. Paolo Scartoni, a distinguished pianist with a master’s degree from the Conservatory of Perugia, focuses on the role of sacred and secular music in Dante, especially the Purgatorio, and in broader medieval discourse, particularly regarding prayer modules.
Within the wide range of musical references in Paradiso, Francesco Ciabattoni tackles a specific topic. The idea of the “harmony of the spheres”—the notion that planets revolving around Earth produce harmonious sounds—was rooted in Pythagorean and Platonic thought. Christian thinkers generally opposed this concept, but Dante appears to adopt it from the very first canto of Paradiso. Ciabattoni argues that Dante uses the idea more as a source of rhetorical imagery than as a genuine metaphysical belief. Through a compelling survey of possible sources—Ambrose, Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville—Ciabattoni assesses the medieval reception of the “harmony of the spheres.” Its popularity was spurred by a passage in The Dream of Scipio (commented on by Macrobius) and by Ambrose’s Hexameron. Associating the harmonious sounds with angels rather than the planets themselves was enough to overturn the pagan theory, which in any case Thomas Aquinas had already refuted on Aristotelian grounds by Dante’s time. Rather than taking a firm position, Dante develops a subtly Platonic account of the “harmonic” nature of the various heavens, suggesting rather than stating that their movement is musical.
The episode of Casella in Purgatorio primarily demonstrates how important performance was in medieval thinking about music. Camboni’s essay focuses on this dimension, looking for textual evidence of how vernacular poems were delivered—an aspect that appears secondary in Dante’s works, overshadowed by the technicalities of composition. References to performance in Dante’s treatises are incidental: in his Convivio he distances himself from other poets by disregarding the rhythmic obligations of canzoni. An emphasis on the geometric proportions of musical rules also appears in a well-known passage of De Vulgari Eloquentia (II viii 4), which introduces a distinction between actio and cantio. Only the latter term is linked to poetic creation, but not necessarily to sung performance. Given the usual correspondence between metrical stanzas and melodic units, it is not surprising that Dante’s treatment of cantio can also involve acoustic and sonic issues. Yet his analysis of Arnaut Daniel’s compositions makes it clear that poetry must be approached independently from any possible musical component. This calls for a mainly verbal and technical evaluation of the lyric form, which reinforces its status at the top of Dante’s hierarchy of poetic styles. In the final part of her essay, Camboni reverses the question, exploring a wide range of contemporary textual evidence—from the Memoriali bolognesi to Vatican Lat. 3973—that shows Dante’s texts being performed with music, possibly while he was still alive.
Drawing on Dante’s treatises as well, Paolo Scartoni’s essay examines the relationship between two central liberal arts in the medieval educational system: grammatica and musica. He contends that Dante’s thinking on these issues is directly shaped by Augustine’s De Ordine and De Musica. Consequently, Dante’s main interest lies in language’s “verbal sound,” as shown by the famous list of “poetic” words in De Vulgari Eloquentia (II vii 5). In other words, the rules of harmony and melody are applied to the combination of sounds—to language itself (in Dante’s terminology, vox, the root of both music and grammar). If Virgil was seen as the summit of grammatical attainment, it is hardly surprising that the early cantos of Inferno—saturated with references to the Aeneid—already establish the framework of a linguistic journey from cacophony to harmony. That journey involves not only a search for expression but also ethical progress, as Scartoni convincingly argues. In this context, the “words of dark color” on the Gates of Hell (Inferno III, 1–9) can be read as a powerful “signification” of words: concepts translated into words, which are then translated into signs. For the pilgrim, reading the inscription prompts the combination of these elements. Scartoni therefore keeps a steady focus on the many aural and acoustic references scattered throughout Dante’s poem, interpreting them as steps in a long journey from various forms of infernal turmoil toward verbal and musical harmony.