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I.
When the Hungarian virtuoso and composer Franz Liszt conducted his Dante Symphony for the first time at the Dresden Royal Theatre in 1857, he knew immediately that the performance had failed. Standing before the constellations of his unseen listeners, tall, severely handsome within the famed graying locks framing his face, Liszt heard the two movements of his symphony outpace and outwit the musicians whom he hadn’t allowed enough rehearsal. The two movements—boiling Inferno, balm-like Purgatorio—only met his own hands, in their fury rather than in their glory.
Liszt had wandered into the black brambles of very publicly failing to adapt one of Europe’s most admired works into a symphonic poem—the musical genre he himself had invented. Even his son-in-law, Hans von Bülow, denounced the symphony as a “fiasco.”
Where was the beatified perfection Liszt had heard like a magnificat while writing the Dante Symphony? Beyond his reach, as ever. But never mind heaven; Richard Wagner himself had advised Liszt against composing the gloried Paradiso as the third movement of the symphony, to instead exalt the ending of Purgatorio: “No majestic Deity! Leave us the fine soft shimmer!” Wagner later phrased it in his autobiography. The fine, soft shimmer, then. Liszt would raise such a sound like a mountain mist in starlight over his next audience and forego heaven.
To raise a symphonic poem from The Divine Comedy only required this one, great loss from Liszt. During his years as the Weimar court’s choirmaster, he’d composed these poems as absolute music which evoked the host of images from the German Romantic literature of the high culture around him, rather than composing more of the sonatas which contained listeners in the patterns of their traditional form. Liszt drew the symphonic poem from the opera overture, which crystallizes in one movement the entire coming narrative. In the Dante Symphony, Liszt dared to move with Dante Alighieri himself: descending to rise, transformed, to salvation.
Inferno
Immediately, horns and tubas confront the two men. Their grim blasts are tense with more growls of sound: Liszt blunts this first musical wall with drumbeats and strings which cut short, quiet strokes, climb to a short wail, and fall again in tempestoso. The music is fear heard as discord, the fear of any soul who passes beneath the eternal lines Dante sees on the gates of Hell:
I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW
One last bellow from the brass arrayed like spears, when the trumpets reach their high G and hold:
ONLY THOSE ELEMENTS TIME CANNOT WEAR WERE MADE BEFORE ME, AND BEYOND TIME I STAND. ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.
Liszt in Hell undergoes Dante’s horrified witness by his ear alone. As the poet heard the sins of the damned in their torments to then behold the sin of his own hubris, so the virtuoso plays them aloud. When a child, Dante had first met the cherubic Beatrice, who in The Divine Comedy sends Virgil to raise Dante again to holiness from the debased arrogance which left him lost, “alone in a dark wood.” When a child prodigy, Liszt received the benediction of a kiss from Beethoven on his own unmarked forehead, this man now overreaching in the black brambles of his artistic failure and sexual infamy.
In the boiling pitch of every note, the music circles in a descent. Its fearful first bombast of brass—the volcanic tubas, the howling trumpets, the thunderous cymbals—may lessen, but it always returns, and as the poem advances deeper into the darkness toward Satan himself, rolling drums mark its way.
In contrast, the occasional call of hesitant strings offers the tragedies of certain unsaved souls: the incestuous, passionate Franscesca, who still speaks of the love for her brother that causes her to “delight in him / that we are one in Hell, as we were above”; the heroic, deceitful Ulysses, who told the sailors he led to death, “Greeks! You were not born to live like brutes, / but to press on toward manhood and recognition!” A harp passes through the distressed air, as though Orpheus had begun to play from his seat in Limbo.
Ever, the strings of the violins, violas, and cellos scale toward the free skies unreachable above them, often climbing from the lowest bass F# to the highest treble E♭. They repeat themselves but can never ascend. These fading scales interlock with both the storming brass and the hesitant strings in the cyclic structure Liszt adapted from Beethoven himself, and their overlap throughout the symphonic poem adapts Dante’s tercet, aba/bcb/cdc scheme to the ear. What cycles in Liszt, transforms: one section, another, and a third will meld to become a fourth form altogether.
By the end of Inferno, the strings become full-bore descending scales that break on the cymbals and horns—the fearful bombast overcoming all the poem’s yearning in the lowest pit of Hell, where Satan chews his worst sinners amidst the frozen Cocytus. The drums’ blows batter Liszt, as the faces of sin battered Dante. In their depravity, they have heard and seen. But their descent reverses at the final drum’s blow. At the nadir of Hell, Dante and Virgil climb through the darkest hollow below the Devil “into the shining world again,” for the deepest sin opens the widest path of grace. In the same way, the direst discord of Liszt’s Inferno welcome the first, dark cellos of Purgatorio, as the composer is suddenly “once more beneath the Stars.”
II.
Purgatorio
Liszt never does reach Paradiso in his symphony. He had originally planned a choral imitation of the poem’s celestial third canticle, but he never wrote it. Even his undaunted, Dantean hubris had its limit at St. Peter’s gate.
But his Purgatorio uplifts farther into the spheres than Dante’s does. The high, guarded mountain which Dante and Virgil behold appears insurmountable from the reedy waters at its base, but the rolling, fluttering arpeggios of the harp and flutes greet us by only the second minute of the music. The beaten drums have not escaped from Liszt’s Hell. Hope is here, in the strings. Hope must climb and kneel low, penitent, as it does, but it remains hope nonetheless.
The instructive hymns which Dante hears between the cornices, sometimes invisibly mobile like wind and sometimes sung by peaceable angels, are heard in these scaling strings. As night falls in Canto VIII, a spirit sings a Compline hymn of sweet contrition into the darkness:
"Te lucis ante" swelled from him so sweetly, with such devotion and so pure a tone, my senses lost the sense of self completely. Then all the others with a golden peal joined in the hymn and sang it to the end, their eyes devoutly raised to Heaven's wheel.
Here, in these voices like candles arrayed on a hill, is the assurance of salvation. Souls in Purgatorio have already been saved for Paradiso. They need only to be purified of their sins, over hundreds of years and through an infinite number of small, sanctifying deeds, as they ascend to the mountain’s peak. If Purgatorio is dubious theology, it is a majestic melody easing through woodwind instruments. Liszt contemplates in Purgatorio. No soul present there will die apart from the Lord, whatever their final labors must be. For the repetitive rising and falling from the high treble E♭-octave through the low treble D-octave do labor, but always sweetly, lightly.
But near the eighth minute, a burden lowers onto the strains of Liszt’s transformation. It may draw from Dante’s physical and spiritual contrition on the cornice of the Proud in Canto XII:
As oxen go in yoke—step matched, head bowed— I moved along beside that laden soul
He is walking with the illustrator Od’risi, who had just muttered this self-rebuke of his own artistic vanity:
"The fame of man is like the green of grass: it comes, it goes; and He by whom it springs bright from the earth's plenty makes it fade and pass."
This eighth-minute turn is a deeper, slower cello which plays a lower pitch among the bass notes, like an anchor. The instruments begin to beckon one another, in the same somber tones Dante and the spirits use to speak of their forgiven sins. A heaving burst of brass like searing memories of Hell splits this conversation by the eleventh minute, but it does not last. Dante envisions St. Stephen the martyr, whose forgiving words purify by sound alone the poet’s heart of wrath. The Purgatorio resumes its shuffling pace, marked lamentoso so the clarinets and violins will lower their voices, hear one another, and repent.
It begins to transform. The Wall of Fire, guarding the earthly paradise in Canto XXVII, is bearable burning because Dante knows he will see Beatrice on the other side. Virgil, like the guiding clarinets now muted, passes from Dante now “past the steep ways, past the narrow part.” Dante has finally repented unto heavenly wisdom, Virgil says:
"Expect no more of me in word or deed: here your will is upright, free, and whole, and you would be in error not to heed whatever your own impulse prompts you to: lord of yourself I crown and mitre you."
Dante relishes the “sweet air” of the “luxuriant holy forest evergreen” where Virgil has led him. It is here, at the cornice of the sixteenth minute and fortieth second, that the Heavenly Pageant greets Dante and Liszt. It advances slowly, in an upturned violin solo like sunlight. A flute announces the entry of the Golden Candelabra, the elders, the beasts, the chariot, and the griffon, and the other instruments take up its four-note tune. They swell with the glory the entire poem has been anticipating, and the music is now transformed from its cycling. Dante is nearly mute and entirely overpowered the sight of the procession: “‘What can this be?’ I asked myself in awe.”
It is Beatrice, and “the colors of live flame played on her gown” like the first, heavenly choral voices. Her Christlike grace brought Dante from his dark wood to this foot of heaven. Her face, now beheld so long after her death, reminds him of the righteousness he had once known:
My soul—such years had passed since last it saw that lady and stood trembling in her presence, stupefied by the power of holy awe— now, by some power that shone from her above the reach and witness of my mortal eyes, felt the full mastery of enduring love.
Enduring love spurs the female chorus that overtakes Purgatorio by the nineteenth minute, the chorus who sings the angelic gratitudes of the first two verses from the magnificat hymn: “Magnificat ánima mea Dominum. / Et exultavit spíritus meus: in Deo salutarí meo.”
My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my voice hath rejoiced in God my Savior.
A harmonium and a harp supplement this ethereal choir as its souls repeat, again and again, “In Deo salutarí meo, in Deo salutarí meo!” This Marian hymn at the appearance of Beatrice surpasses the likeness Dante has drawn between Beatrice and the other holy women of eternity, like the “spensa, de Libano,” for, like Mary to all the earth, Beatrice is Dante’s foremost female figure of divine love and the bringer of new life to undeserving man. “Hosannah,” the chorus sings, “hallelujah!” For Liszt, the entrance of Beatrice is the nearest his symphony will rise to heaven. An infinite choir worships God with star-like beauty. Holy thunder returns in the brass but is now transformed, now redeemed.
By the twenty-first minute of Purgatorio, the trumpets herald the four-note melody of hope one last time. The symphony falls away, as even the most beautiful efforts of men must. “Magnificat,” sings the choir, or perhaps the voice is a lone soloist, a woman of beautiful faith: “Magnificat aníma mea Dóminum. Et Exultavit spiritus meus: in Deo salutarí meo.” Her sisters join her again, to offer a cavalcade of hosannas and hallelujahs as the music prepares for its final rest, in the sweetest chords of harmonium and strings.
These instruments are brothers to Dante, who is at last, fully, in God’s service by the final lines of his Purgatorio:
I came back from those holiest waters new, remade, reborn, like a sun-wakened tree that spreads new foliage to the Spring dew in sweetest freshness, healed of Winter's scars; perfect, pure, and ready for the stars.
He enters Paradiso. Liszt, his inheritor, does not. The falling rays of majesty, worship, and peace in the magnificat section of his Purgatorio were perhaps enough to ease the lamentoso strains of his purification. Or perhaps they weren’t, since in 1865, Liszt received minor holy orders as a Franciscan, to better devote his compositions to God through the Church. His final years as a monk compose a similar movement as his Dante Symphony: Liszt, yearning for the heavenly spheres and to Him who first moved music within them, writes what small beauty he can while remaining earthbound, in view of the stars.
Thanks for being here, y’all. It’s not only possible but possibly fruitful to write about Dante for your entire life. That’s not my plan, but worst things could befall me.
I’ve been quoting from the John Ciardi translation of The Divine Comedy, for reference. As to my commentary on the Dante Symphony and its critical reception, I have referenced this Interlude article by Georg Predota, this American Symphony introduction written by Bernard Jacobson for the symphony’s 2002 performance at Lincoln Center, and a PDF version of all its sheet music from the 19th-century Franz Liszts Musikalische Werke: für Orchester Symphonien (the Eine Symphonie Zu Dantes Divina Commedia). For the composer’s biographical details, I referenced the New Advent “Liszt” entry.
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Literary Christianity, with humble rigor.
Trying to capture music in words is tough. Trying to capture music that's trying to capture Dante is tougher. Well done, Kevin! I had no idea Liszt became a Franciscan monk. Learned something today.
I’ve never listened to this, although your post makes me think perhaps I should. Liszt’s orchestral works are a very mixed bag—some of them (I’m looking at you, Les Préludes) are truly awful—but I thought the Faust Symphony was surprisingly good. So I may give this one a chance. Thanks for the inspiration.