A violin for Dante

This project, my latest collaboration with the wonderful MIA Minneapolis Institute of Art, is a dialogue with the astonishing, 1546 Salviati tapestry of Dante & Virgil.. I am profoundly grateful to the team there, particularly Rachel MacGarry, Max Bryant and Anna Dilliard, for all they are doing to inspire this adventure.

Here is some of the old and new music I have been recording as counterpoint to this wonderful tapestry and the hanging alongside it . Thanks to Adaq Khan for the wonderful engineering. So to begin, 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 inspired 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!

The top right of Salviati’s tapestry is dominated by the Dante’s ‘Dark Wood’ – his ‘Selva oscura’. All the way through ‘Inferno’ the image of the forest is evoked, even though Virgil helps the him to escape in Book 1 (into Hell!). So we have ‘la mesta selva/the sad forest’, he finds himself ‘de la selva rimassi/far from the forest’, ‘la selva fonda/the deep forest’ and, over and again he puns on selva (forest) – selvaggia (savage), when recalling the terror of woods- “selva selvaggia e aspra e forte” (the “wild forest, harsh and dense”). Here is Salviati’s oppressive foliage, with Ortiz ‘clasulas’ to help us find our way.

There’s a similar angst around ‘smarrita’, which returns in many guises, as a symbol of many obfuscations!  (tutto smarrito de la grande angoscia…’.

And worth noting, that at the beginning of Canto 20, Dante starts telling us -that he is not going to tell us everything he and Virgil discuss, and then, at the beginning of canto 32, that his writing is inadequate to express what he is seeing, that ‘che non e impresa da pigliare a gabbo/discriver fondo a tutto l’universo/ne da lingua che chiami mamma of babbo’. Bearing in mind that we have just had Nimrod’s famous post-Babel babble, this is amazing :’Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi’.

The room in which the meeting of Dante and Virgil hangs represents many meetings, many journeys, the journey accross time, from Virgil, to Dante, to Salviati, to Guercino, to us. One of the steps on the way is emotional (1772) marble of the great desert hermit-saint, St Paul. When I was working with the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, composer Michael Alec Rose and I worked with an amazing painting, made in the century after Dante wrote ‘Inferno’, by the ‘Master of the Osservanza’. This depicts the miraculous journey of St Anthony to find St Paul in the desert. There can be little doubt that this artist had Dante’s literary journey in his mind when he painted his ‘road trip’ and I was delighted to reach from the 15th century to the 18th, to our time, and from one wonderful institution (NGA) to another.

Here’s a new performance of Dafina Zeqiri Nushi’s ‘Sankta Catarina’ which I played next to the Salviati tapestry. This was originally written in response to an extraordinary late 15th century wall-painting in the ‘Merchants’ Chapel’ (Kramarekapellet) in Malmo, Sweden. At the heart of the piece, you will hear a terrifying representation of the matyrdom of the saint. Saint Catherine does not figure explicityly in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’: however, the mortification of the body certainly does, so it felt a vital (and beautiful)work to include.

So lets turn our attention back to the 1500’s the century of Salviati’s masterpiece. Here is a ‘Ricercar’ (a ‘searching’) by the Venetian composer Bassano, married up with a luna ecliples I watched in England a couple of weeks after this project at MIA. The Moon’s celestial sphere appears in Dante’s ‘Paradiso’ as the first and lowest sphere of heaven, the abode of inconstant, yet saved souls. The Moon appears in the room in MIA where the Salviati hangs, associated with two figures – the Virgin Mary, and the Goddess Artemis, with her beloved hounds, who have just torn unfortunate Acteon to pieces.

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.