I figured I might as well join the pantheon of composers who have written music inspired by Dante and/or the Divine Comedy. The lightning-like runs (you'll recognize them when you hear them) were composed ages ago: like early 2012, at the latest. At the time they struck me as Lisztian in a way that I couldn't define then, and I can't define now either. Suffice it to say that the rest of the piece, nonsense and some-sense alike, flowed from them in varying degrees of torpidity.
I recall Leslie Howard, in all his rotund sarcastic glory, remarking that one could always tell when the performer of a work based on literature or poetry had not read the literary work in question. By extension, no doubt, it can be safely supposed that one would also be able to tell when the composer of such a work had omitted to read the literary work. I confess that I have not actually read the Divine Comedy, since I have always found myself drawn to some other task whenever I have picked it up. One of these days I hope I shall get around to reading Longfellow's translation of the work, which has been sitting around on my Kindle for over three years now.
While on the topic of Dante, I feel compelled to say that people who take a romantic view of Dante's love life (whatever it amounts to) disgust me. This girl he was pining after - Beatrice or Beatitude or whatever - probably only knew him in the passing, and Dante himself was so much older than her that it's difficult to view him other than as a creep in this so-called "relationship". I mean, I get that she was his muse and everything, and without her Dante would probably have been stuck writing fan fiction of the meanest variety, but there's a difference between admiring his work and admiring the man. Because Dante was, quite uncontroversially, I think, a creep when it came to Benedictine, and to suggest otherwise would be to admit that one would be okay with stalkerish behavior like that in today's world.
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I figured I might as well join the pantheon of composers who have written music inspired by Dante and/or the Divine Comedy. The lightning-like runs (you'll recognize them when you hear them) were composed ages ago: like early 2012, at the latest. At the time they struck me as Lisztian in a way that I couldn't define then, and I can't define now either. Suffice it to say that the rest of the piece, nonsense and some-sense alike, flowed from them in varying degrees of torpidity.
I recall Leslie Howard, in all his rotund sarcastic glory, remarking that one could always tell when the performer of a work based on literature or poetry had not read the literary work in question. By extension, no doubt, it can be safely supposed that one would also be able to tell when the composer of such a work had omitted to read the literary work. I confess that I have not actually read the Divine Comedy, since I have always found myself drawn to some other task whenever I have picked it up. One of these days I hope I shall get around to reading Longfellow's translation of the work, which has been sitting around on my Kindle for over three years now.
While on the topic of Dante, I feel compelled to say that people who take a romantic view of Dante's love life (whatever it amounts to) disgust me. This girl he was pining after - Beatrice or Beatitude or whatever - probably only knew him in the passing, and Dante himself was so much older than her that it's difficult to view him other than as a creep in this so-called "relationship". I mean, I get that she was his muse and everything, and without her Dante would probably have been stuck writing fan fiction of the meanest variety, but there's a difference between admiring his work and admiring the man. Because Dante was, quite uncontroversially, I think, a creep when it came to Benedictine, and to suggest otherwise would be to admit that one would be okay with stalkerish behavior like that in today's world.
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