A Symphony From Hell
By Joseph Chen
“The Pacific Symphony.” Carl St. Claire Music Director, 2021, https://www.pacificsymphony.org/about_us/history. Accessed 11 Dec. 2023.
During the Second Great Awakening, composers started to draw inspiration from Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” to express their angst toward the inevitability of death. Through the purposeful separation of the symphony into movements, various musical elements, and direct references to the cantos in his piece titled A Symphony to Dante's Divine Comedy, the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt channels Dante’s internal agony and illustrates his external strifes as he navigates through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, drawing inspiration from “Dante’s Divine Comedy.”
Premiered in November of 1857, A Symphony to Dante's Divine Comedy consists of two separate movements with the first one representing Inferno and the second representing both Purgatorio and Paradiso. Through the symphony, Liszt not only retells the tale of Dante’s journey in distinct movements but, at the same time, also reveals Dante’s emotions and external conflict throughout his path through Inferno and Purgatorio.
Throughout the first movement, “The Inferno”, Liszt draws inspiration from the dark landscape of Inferno and captures the tension that Dante experienced walking through the fallen kingdom by setting the overall tone of the music to be dark and ominous. Liszt incorporated dragged-out chords played by the lower strings to portray “the abyss, the melancholy valley containing thundering, unending wailings“ (Alighieri, Inferno Canto 4, lines 7-9). The entire movement mirrors Dante’s internal agony in his position in Inferno.
Transitioning into the second movement, “The Purgatorio”, the style of music shifted from dark and intense to solemn and regretful. Utilizing dissonant chords that seemingly go on forever, Liszt captures the essence of the “fruitless longing of those men” trapped in purgatory (Alighieri, Purgatorio Canto 3, line 40).
The fundamental difference between the two mediums is the absence of Virgil and his influence on Dante in Liszt’s symphony. Dr. C.J. Ryan from the University of Illinois explains that Virgil’s presence is crucial when it comes to understanding Dante’s journey, without it, a deeper understanding of Dante’s actions is not possible. Furthermore, the intention behind the poem and symphony also differs. Musicologist Detlef Altenburg explains that Liszt wrote the symphony with the sole intention of capturing the emotional essence of the poem, while Dante wrote the poem intending to explore the themes of sin and redemption.
Liszt musically portrayed Dante’s emotional landscape across the score of his symphony, utilizing various cords and different rhythms to bring the audience along Dante’s journey within the concert hall. This further confirms Dante’s lasting influence on modern and contemporary art beyond the world of literature.
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by H. F. Cary, Wordsworth Editions, 2009.
Altenburg, Detlef. “Franz Liszt and the Legacy of the Classical Era.” 19th-Century Music, vol. 18, no. 1, 1994, pp. 46–63. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/746601. Accessed 9 Dec. 2023.
Blumhofer, Jonathan. “Rethinking the Repertoire #16 – – Franz Liszt’s ‘Dante’ Symphony.” The Arts Fuse, 6 Nov. 2023, artsfuse.org/168334/rethinking-the-repertoire-16-franz-liszts-dante-symphony/.
Jacobson, Bernard. “A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy.” American Symphony Orchestra, 25 Jan. 2002, americansymphony.org/concert-notes/a-symphony-to-dantes-divine-comedy/.
Ryan, C. J. “Inferno XXI: Virgil and Dante: A Study in Contrasts.” Italica, vol. 59, no. 1, 1982, pp. 16–31. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/478529. Accessed 10 Dec. 2023.