A violin for Dante

More from this week of recording and exploration. The first of my responses to the 1546 Salviati tapestry of Dante & Virgil at Minneapolis Institute of Art . Thanks to Adaq Khan for the wonderful engineering. A much loved chaconne by Colombi

This depicts a crucial moment from  Canto I of Dante’s Inferno. Here the poet, escaping from the ‘dark wood’ emerges into the light, but is threatened by a Lion, a Panther and a She-Wolf. His only hope is the figure of his idol as a writer, Virgil, who leads him from the immediate peril, but into the entrance to Hell, and on the path of the famous journey that follows. Nearly every artist, writer, and composer since, has found themselves referring to Dante’s adventures, just as he took inspiration, as he says in Inferno from Virgil, who was inspired by Homer … and so on. So, the 16^th century tapestry of this great 14^th century poem, is a step on the path, leading to the paintings, sculpture and textiles in the room where it hangs.

The music will chart a similar course, beginning in Salviati’s Italy, but finding its way to living composers inspire by art from the 15^th and 16^th centuries, and including a world premiere of a work written for Salviati’s tapestry, and for this space.

When I was invited to respond to the wonderful Salviati tapestry at MIA I was, at once, both excited and overwhelmed: bewildered even. How do we respond to something that is fundamental to who we are, the ideas, the material of which we are made. For, from the moment that the first of Dante Alighieri’s three canticles making up the ‘Divine Comedy’ appeared in any form at the end of the second decade of the 13^th century, he confirmed his status as one of the creators of the culture that we recognise, in too varied facets for any one of us to grasp.

So the only thing that any of us can do, is to just try: every response to Dante in the past seven centuries has been, to a greater or lesser extent, an act of autobiography, incorporating those who had walked Dante’s path in the years since his death. When Salviati conceived this extraordinary tapestry, voices as disparate as Raphael, Petrarch, Castiglione, Geoffrey Chaucer, Botticelli, Boccaccio, Vida, Martin Luther,

So this will be personal, and will come from two directions, the active and the passive. In my early teens, I ‘discovered’ Dante. This initially came from saving up to buy Dorothy Sayers’s Penguin ‘Black Back’ translation of the trilogy, which was in part due to the fact that I had been introduced to her detective fiction, the embittered character of Lord Peter Wimsey, and was intrigued by her ‘other life’. Then, at a junk market stall in Greenwich, very early one Saturday morning, I found an exquisite 1881 edition of the Comedia, translated into modern Italian and commentated by Anton Lubin. This had, or rather has (it’s on the table here) exquisite engravings of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. I discovered that the Latin that I studied at school ( I had a traditional English classical education – Latin and Ancient Greek) was enough to help me stumble through the tessarines with some help from Sayers, and the story, or rather stories, started to inch their way into my consciousness.

Dante laid the ground for so much that followed, in literature, cosmology, language, science, art, politics, religion, music, in the European consciousness. There are things that we do and say every day, which result directly from his ideas and ideals. The Salviati tapestry hangs alongside more than two centuries of art which reflects that. An author who sought to emulate him, two centuries after his death, at the other end of the Renaissance which he was involved in initiating, was Torquato Tasso (1544-1595). Tasso modelled his persona and apparent exile on his hero Dante. They both inspired the romantic generation from Goethe onwards to model themselves on him. In 1817, Lord Byron wrote:

Tasso’s epic  poem ‘Gerusaleme Liberata’ was completed in 1581 – it was directly inspired by Dante. Like the ‘Divine Comedy’ one of its themes is ‘who are you? who am I?’ Both are full of character misidentifying themselves and others, whether in the fog of the afterlife or religious war.

Hanging to the left of our tapestry of Dante recognising Virgil, we have Guercino /Giovanni Francesco Barbieri’s wonderful 1648 Erminia and the Shepherds, when Erminia reassures shepherds and children, in a pastoral setting, that she is not a warrior bent on murder, by removing her helmet (clear echoes of Hector and Andromache).

The great Padua-based violinist composer Giuseppe Tartini wrote an enormous cycle of solo sonatas subtantially inspired by Tasso’s masterpiece and his life. It includes mottos from ‘Jerusalem Liberated’ alongside quotes from Petrarch, written in substitution alphabets in the manuscript. Here is numner 6 of the cylcle with the Guercino: Dante talks to Tasso talks to Guercino and then to Tartini: A conversation over 4 centuries. Here is number six of the 6 hour set – an melancholy pastoral ideally matched to Guercino’s delicacy, and recorded in a similarly pastoral setting, in the middle of sheep and goats in England’s Chiltern hills!

Grammy nominated Violinist, Peter Sheppard Skærved has a long association with MIA, which began with tapestry! The first time that he played here was in 2017, to celebrate the arrival of a tapestry by the great Norwegian artist Jan Groth (1938-2022). Since then, he has been integrally involved in the 2022 exhibit ‘Revolution a la Mode’, and his recordings of French 18^th century music can be heard in the ‘Grand Salon’ exhibit at MIA.