Singing Dante: The Literary Origins of Cinquecento Monody. By Elena Abramov-van Rijk

Abstract

In Singing Dante: The Literary Origins of Cinquecento Monody Elena Abramov-van Rijk returns to a topic that was the concern of her first book (Parlar Cantando: The Practice of Reciting Verse in Italy from 1300 to 1600 (Bern, 2009)), this time with a focus on ‘the earliest pre-operatic phases of the crystallization of the stile recitativo’ (p. 10). Singing Dante explores a specific episode, Vincenzo Galilei’s declamation of an excerpt from Dante’s Commedia (the so-called ‘lamento del Conte Ugolino’, Inferno, XXXIII, lines 4–75) before Giovanni de’ Bardi and members of the Camerata Fiorentina in 1581 or 1582. This episode, although often mentioned in literature and textbooks as one of the earliest attempts to revive ancient Greek monophonic singing, has never been explored by musicologists to such an extent. The music of Galilei’s setting has not survived, and the only record of this musical experiment is in a letter written in 1634 by Pietro de’ Bardi (son of Giovanni) to Giovan Battista Doni, which the latter included in the revised version of his Trattato della musica scenica. Crucially, Galilei is here said to have been ‘il primo a comporre melodie a una voce sola’. Abramov-van Rijk analyses the episode involving Galilei’s performance in the light of sixteenth-century literary theories of poetics that have a bearing on practices of singing poetry.