MUSIC IN DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY: To the 700th Anniversary of the Memory

Abstract

The article examines the famous literary and artistic work of the Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri "Divine Comedy". In the Comedy a special place is occupied by the musical content, which enriches the literary images of the afterlife. Many works of Western researchers pay attention to the "philosophy of music" of Dante's work. The opinions of various scholars who single out the following musical references are considered: songs and musical instruments, liturgical sung texts and psalms, the presence of monophonic and polyphonic sounds, the reflection of the Boethian principles: musica mundana, humana, instrumentalis and assumptions about the poet's own vision of the development of music. Authors saw the relation with words used to designate the music itself. They have focused on moments of structural and literary relations in these sacred texts respect to each other, analysed the "singing" relationship between heroes of Comedy. The considered a set of key cases resonates with music and sound: infernal dissonance, cacophony emphasizes the immorality Inferno; the middle part Purgatorio, is the central part of Comedy is the musical bridge between the “anti-music” of Inferno and the divine music of Paradiso. The music running these canticas throughout psalms and hymns voiced by choirs of souls. Recent scholarship on the literary aspects and musicology enables us as one level up of the meaning of Comedy. This philosophical and metaphysical aspects of Dante`s thought maybe give us information about music life in 14th century. Interesting material is supplemented by quotations from the Ukrainian translation of Maxim Strikha, which preserves the poetics of speech and sound means by which Dante tried to portray his visions.