Francesco Ciabattoni, Professor of Italian Literature at Georgetown University, has been working on the relationship between literature and music in several forms, up to the contemporary. Regarding the latter, and in particular regarding music of the XX and XXI century, he and several of his colleagues created the website The Italian Song (https://theitaliansong.com/). Talking about early poetry, he had already researched about Dante in his book Dante’s journey to Polyphony. Dante’s Performance is his latest book, released in August 2024: what Francesco Ciabattoni aims to do is to find the red thread that links the Commedia to, as the subtitle says, ‘Music, Dance and Drama’. You can download the book for free at the following link.
Dante’s Performance aims to analize how the Commedia deals with the different sides of performativity: not only theatre, but also dancing and singing, and every aspect of the oral culture in Dante’s times (p.2). What was the genesis of this book, what were the reasons that led to its creation?)
Dante’s poem is extraordinary in many ways, but one aspect that is sometimes overlooked is its ability to activate in the reader a series of shared memories such as the musical memory of a psalm, or the memory of attending a liturgical drama or a carnival performance. Similar episodes abound in the Commedia, but reading it seven hundred years later, we need to reconstruct the performative and oral contexts of that era to fully appreciate this dimension. This is what Dante’s Performance aims to do. And besides, in many late medieval texts that describe the afterlife, a certain “theatrical” dimension (quotation marks are required as a reminder that it is not the same theater we enjoy today) was pervasive: for example, the Jeu d’Adam, one of the many Ordines prophetarum that included a procession of dead prophets through the loci deputati (symbolic stops during the procession), or the Visio Thurkilli, one of the many infernal visiones of the late Middle Ages, which represents hell as a theatre in which sinners are punished spectacularly by devils. This is as much a literary device as it is an anthropological need: to process the fear of death and eternal damnation, we must represent them as if on stage and act them out, or at least read them as such. Jeffrey Schnapp stated that “hell, the Middle Age’s ‘theatrum diaboli’ by definition, emerged as the most logical site for the Christian re-elaboration of tragic ideals.” All this also happens in the Commedia, and not only in the Inferno. The final cantos of the Paradiso use theatrical language to depict the rose of the blessed: words like grado, larva, di soglia in soglia… digradar, scalee, scanno, semicirculi, refer to the architecture of a theatre.
Between the two chapters concerning Purgatorio and Paradiso, there’s one about dancing, in which dance is analysed throughout the entirety of Dante’s poem. Why this choice, why did you make the decision to create a separate chapter for this specific artistic expression, and why did you include it before the chapter on Paradiso? What do you think Dante wishes to express through dance?)
Placing the chapter on dance between Purgatorio and Paradiso somewhat mirrors the placement which Dante himself assigns to dance, which becomes important in the earthly paradise—that is, in the final cantos of Purgatorio—and then persists in the Paradiso as an expression of joy and divine glory. Among other things, it often feminizes illustrious figures of Christian history such as the dancing theologians of Paradiso X or St. John in Paradiso XXIV. Despite a deep-rooted suspicion toward bodily expression, especially in religious circles, an intellectual tradition that recognized the positive value of dance existed in the Middle Ages. A few decades ago, John Freccero linked the Trinitarian choreography of Paradiso X to the Platonic myths of the anima mundi and the chorea stellarum, later Christianized and absorbed into the Acts of John, Macrobius’s Commentary on the Timaeus, Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, as well as the book of Revelations. Others (Paolo Cherchi and Selene Sarteschi) instead read the dance of the wise men in the Heaven of the Sun as a perichoresis, a concept borrowed from Anaxagoras and imported into the Christian world by Gregory of Nazantius. It consisted of a sacred procession in which the Trinity dances and gives life to the universe with its eternal circular motion. My reading views the singing and choreographic performance of the wise spirits (St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, St. Bonaventure, Siger of Brabant, etc.) as a way to bring the reader’s experience closer to the figures of the Church Doctors. The poet’s goal is to provide access to the spiritual nobility of the wise through a sublimation of the most popular devotional forms, including women’s dance, which were often popularized through Franciscanism.
In different parts of the book and in your discussions about different cantos, you often cite franciscan lauds, especially from the Umbrian area, and in some cases you hypothesize that Dante directly quoted from these texts. How would these lauds have entered into the network of Dante’s sources, and how much of this could we consider precise quotation rather than from memory?)
I would say that it is mostly a question of literary, musical, or performative memory, and to a marginal extent perhaps also of more direct revivals. It is difficult to delineate with precision the nature of these references, because the oral or gestural tradition does not persist except through brief written descriptions. However, it can be said with some amount of certainty that the Franciscan contribution was fundamental in spreading a renewed devotion and spirituality through performance in processions, dances, recited and sung prayers. The passiones (that of Montecassino, for example, which dates back to the 12th century and could have some textual relation with the words of Farinata in Inferno X) were a form of sacred drama practiced in Franciscan circles between Umbria and the Marches, and later in Tuscany, and they profoundly influenced poets close to Dante, such as Iacopone da Todi and Guittone d’Arezzo.
On page 85 you write “Dante reused phrases and quotes from popular sources as the building blocks of his sacred poem.” What can we say about this recycling of quotations from polular sources? To what extent do they refer to single episodes as opposed to permeating the entire poem?)
Except in a few cases textual borrowings are rare but still existent in the poetry of the Commedia. The few textual cases that can be identified in this sense are of great interest, because they allow us to affirm that Dante was not afraid to embrace the popular, performative or musical culture of his time and to rework it by including it in his own text.
In addition to the above quoted Passion of Montecassino, which shows likely traces in Inferno X, we should think of such episodes as the quarrel between an angel and a devil over the soul of Bonconte da Montefeltro (Purgatorio V) as literary adaptations of well-rehearsed popular dramas, as we read in the Passione di Revello or the Contrasto fra Belzebù e Setanasso: these plays were called contrasto or conflictus and were a wide-spread dramaturgical genre in many Italian cities.
Another notable case is the discussion of the polyphonic organ in Paradiso XVII; Cacciaguida’s words (“sì come a orecchia / dolce armonia da organo, mi viene / a vista il tempo che ti s’apparecchia”) seem to be borrowed from the technical language of musical treatises from that period, such as those by Marchettus of Padova or Jacques de Liège. Marchettus is a possible and indeed probable source for textual borrowings, since he wrote the Lucidarium between 1309 and 1318, somewhere between Cesena and Verona. In short, there is a need for research to be conducted on both textual and historical bases.
While talking about popular sources, you say “I am convinced that had he not drawn from popular sources as mystery plays, folklore or songs, the poetry of the Commedia would not be so universally appealing and successful” (p. 85). In what way do you think this use of the performative could have contributed to the success and the diffusion of the Commedia?)
The musical, choreographic and theatrical dimensions of the text give it an eidetic quality; in other words, they force the reader to visualize and listen, to use all the senses. Furthermore, the reference to the Mysteries, to psalms and hymns or to sacred and popular dances, activates the memory of an experience shared by the entire Christian and civic community, acting as a unifying element for a reading audience who have something in common, even if they do not know each other. This contributes to the universality of Dante’s poetry.
Dante introduces the concept of corpo aereo and in doing so he enters into the philosophical debates contemporary to his time. With this concept he vividly represents the experiences of souls in all three realms. To what extent do performance and performativity, in their various iterations, emphasise this focus on the body which is already so important for Dante?)
Through the words of Statius (Purgatorio XXV), Dante explains the complex metaphysical process by which the souls of the damned and penitents—by definition incorporeal and therefore devoid of a sensorial system—can feel pain: an aerial body similar to the original is created for them when they reach the afterlife, and this body carries out the functions of the nervous system, thus allowing the punishments to have their effect. But beyond the theological and rationalistic implications, the aerial body serves precisely as a means to offer a physical representation of the damned and to enable them to act on the afterlife’s stage. One of the criticisms which readers sometimes direct at the third canticle is that it contains little action and too much doctrine. This occurs because the souls of the blessed do not have aerial bodies and appear as pure luminescences, which makes physical imagination difficult. And yet this device allows Dante to create images of a bold and never-before-seen beauty, such as the river of splendors that flows from the outer heavens in Canto XXI: it is another grandly choreographic performance, but without the physicality of bodies.
You’ve already talked about the interactions between music and literature, not only in Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, but also in terms of the contemporary era with La citazione è sintomo d’amore. In your opinion, is there a common thread that can link these experiences together?)
I am fascinated by the way in which textuality and performativity—voice, physicality, images in motion—combine and interact. No textual discourse can be completely divorced from corporeality: the text necessarily rests upon a support, even if it is a virtual one, and evokes sensory experiences. Intellect and body go together, and this is often reflected in my hermeneutic approach.
Still talking about the musical field, why do you think we find polyphony only in the Paradiso, and what do we find in the other two realms? What is this journey we might define as a musical performance, leading to this polyphonic finale?)
Polyphony exists in the Paradiso as a celebratory expression of glory and as a metaphor for the harmony of the cosmos that permeates the blessed souls. Music is metaphysical in Dante’s Paradise, and also functions as a non-verbal means to express the inexpressible, a means of communication—obviously evoked through the words of poetry!—which transcends rationality in a Bonaventurian way, rife with mysticism. In fact, the words of “songs that slip, and fade, and fall from memory” (Par. XX, 12) even manage to escape the poet’s memory, but they also leave an indelible mark on the spirit of the reader. In my book mentioned above (Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, Toronto 2010), I trace the musical—meaning the spiritual—path of the Comedy, a path that can be understood in light of the innovations of medieval polyphony, quickly evolving in the years between the Ars antiqua and the blossoming Ars nova (Marchetto da Padova mentioned above).
After investigating the literary sources of Italian pop music, and after this book about Dante, what will be your next topics of interest?
As a member of the Dante Society of America and the American Boccaccio Association, I will definitely continue to study our great medieval writers, but my interests are also leaning in other directions: for example, Norman Sicily as a crossroads of different religious and literary cultures, but also contemporary Italian poetry, which I have somewhat neglected of late, but have a deep appreciation for.
L'autore
- Emanuela Monini (1997) si laurea a Perugia in Filologia Romanza con una tesi riguardante le terzine provenzali della Commedia. Ha parlato ai convegni del ciclo Charun dimonio e l’immaginario mitologico dantesco, presso il MANU (Museo Archeologico Nazionale dell’Umbria), portando le figure di Medusa e della Ruota della Fortuna. Le piace il Signore degli Anelli, e ha deciso di farne un tratto della personalità, si appassiona a problemi filologici ma solo se irrisolvibili, e ogni tanto scrive qualche poesia.
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