FRANZ LISZT - nca - new classical adventure

Dante Alighieri (ca 1265-1321), written about 1307
and completed shortly before his death, is not only
one of the most important literary monuments, the
first extensive poetical work in the Italian language,
but also still counts today as one of, if not the,
supreme work of Italian literature, and at the same
time as one of the most significant achievements in
the whole of world literature.
In “The Divine Comedy” Dante gives a first-person
account of travels through the after-life. The
journey is necessary “because I had lost the right
road”. It serves as purification and, since Dante’s
living “I” figure is accorded access to the world of
the dead, is a great honour. With the Roman poet
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Vergil as his leader Dante must first pass through
Hell (Inferno), starting out from limbo, where the
original sinners, the unbaptised infants, and the
poets and philosophers of antiquity sojourn, thence
to the Hell of the damned, where Lucifer crunches
the three arch-traitors Judas, Brutus and Cassius
between his teeth. Then Dante and Vergil reach
the second realm of the underworld, Purgatory.
Here at the foot of the mountain they find the
dead who are guilty of the most heinous misdeeds,
and the higher the two travellers climb the more
noble are the figures they meet by the wayside. At
the summit, Beatrice, an angelic, idealised female
figure becomes Dante’s guide. With her, Dante
ascends into Paradise, where he is finally permitted
to fathom the Trinity and God himself.
The entire spiritual cosmos of late mediaeval
times is to be found in “The Divine Comedy”.
Dante’s after-life is populated by mythical figures,
artists, sages and other historical personages from
contemporary Florence, known today only from
Dante’s poem.
Formally, “The Divine Comedy” is imbued
throughout with a wealth of harmonious con-
centration. Following an introductory cantus,
each of the regions Hell, Purgatory and Paradise
are passed through in 33 canti. Each of the realms
of the afterlife is subdivided into nine steps.
Throughout Dante uses the verse form of three
lines, the terza rima, whereby the lines of eleven
syllables are linked from verse to verse by an
interlocking rhyming scheme.
Franz Liszt was familiar with “The Divine Comedy”
from his Paris years. During his travels in Italy at
the end of the 1830s he and his lover and “muse”,
Marie d’Agoult, had seized the opportunity to
engage in intensive study Dante’s poetry of and that
of Petrarch. Soon afterwards the first sketches for
a piano work, the “Dante Sonata”, emerged which
although first published in 1861, was virtually in
its final version by 1849; but even as early as 1847
Liszt had already noted down his first ideas for a
symphony based on the Commedia.
During his Weimar days, in 1855, immediately
following the completion of the first version of
the “Faust Symphony”, Liszt set to work on the
composition of the “Dante Symphony”, which was
finished by 1856. The composer’s original intention
had been to write music inspired by Bonaventura
Genelli’s Dante illustrations, a series of line
drawings he had created between 1840 and 1846.
These were to have been projected onto a screen
by means of the newly invented diorama, but this
novel idea, just like the plan to construct a wind
machine for the Inferno section of the symphony,
was abandoned.
In 1857 the work was given a disastrous reception
in Dresden, largely as a result of being too little
rehearsed, though it gradually won acceptance. In
1859 Liszt also arranged the work for two pianos.
In contrast to the one-movement “Dante Sonata”,
the symphony is planned in several movements.
It may have been part of Liszt’s original intention
to devote one movement to each of the three
parts of Dante’s poem. Wagner, with whom
Liszt corresponded about his project, advised
him against a Paradise section, claiming that it
was neither within human capability nor that of
music to imagine or portray the glory of heaven.
Just how far Liszt heeded Wagner’s objections
must remain a mystery. In the version that finally
appeared the symphony has only two movements.
Dante’s Paradiso is represented by a Magnificat
that follows the Purgatorio without a break and
is sung by women’s or boys’ voices. The Magnificat
does not describe the joys of Paradise, but allows
an impression to be formed from a distance. At any
rate by integrating the human voice, which makes
the qualitative leap to Paradise plausible also for
the hearer, Liszt succeeded in a clever counter
move to that argument of Wagner’s, to whom, as
the score shows, this work is dedicated.
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