About this Piece

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was a Florentine who lived about 20 of his 56 years in exile but whose life and work were forever tied to the city of his birth. An accomplished poet in his 20s, he composed La vita nuova (New Life) in 1294 in tribute to Beatrice Portinari, whom he had loved since childhood. He and Beatrice married other people; she died in 1290 at about age 24. When, half a lifetime later, Dante composed his Divine Comedy in the years before his death, Beatrice was again central to his thoughts. As the protagonist of his poem, he made it through his ordeal directly through Beatrice’s intervention in Heaven. She assigned the shade of Dante’s great Roman predecessor Virgil to guide the Pilgrim through Hell and Purgatory, then she took him into Elysium herself.

Dante’s three-part epic La Divina Commedia was immensely influential from the start, not only for such literary successors as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Joyce’s Ulysses, but for other arts. Portraits of the poet himself exist by Giotto, Domenico di Michelino, and Botticelli, to name just a few, and artists across centuries depicted Dante’s intricate, circle-within-circle conception of the three realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. “Inferno” was the basis for a film as early as 1911, and there have been many since. In music, familiar Dante-inspired works include Franz Liszt’s Dante Symphony for orchestra and Dante Sonata for solo piano, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini, and Giacomo Puccini’s comic one-act opera Gianni Schicchi as well as Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s “film opera” La Commedia. The multilayered richness of the Commedia ensures its continued use as a source of inspiration for artists in all forms. In modern media, there are graphic novels and multiple video games based on the poem.

The timing of Thomas Adès’ Dante, his score for Wayne McGregor’s ballet The Dante Project, corresponded roughly to the 700th anniversary of Dante’s poem, the first parts of which were completed by the late 1310s, and of his death in 1321. Rather than call the work The Divine Comedy, the creators wanted to give themselves leeway to create a narrative that reacted expressively and emotionally to Dante’s text rather than adhering consistently to its narrative details. Dante, after all, uses the story of the Pilgrim’s journey through the three realms as a framework for commentary on a wide range of big subjects—science, religion, geography, politics, social mores, love, and his own status as a political exile.

The Dante Project fits with Adès’ own sense of the epic over the previous two decades or so, when much of his compositional energy went to extended undertakings in opera and other large-scale works based on sources with already far-reaching presences in our culture and delving into deep philosophical questions. In opera, he successfully took on Shakespeare’s late romance The Tempest for an opera commissioned by the Royal Opera Covent Garden (2003) as well as the Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s 1962 masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (2016), a co-commission from the Salzburg Festival, the UK’s Royal Opera, the Royal Danish Opera, and New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Totentanz (2013), a 35-minute orchestral work with baritone and mezzo-soprano solos, sets a text accompanying a 15th-century frieze of the “Dance of Death” between the skeletal Grim Reaper and individuals representing all facets of society. Adès previously contemplated the cosmos in such works as In Seven Days, his 2008 piano concerto on the Biblical creation myth; and his “Voyage for Orchestra” Polaris (2010), named for the North Star.

For a composer whose violin concerto is subtitled “Concentric Paths,” Adès would long have recognized kinships between aspects of his own large-scale formal predilections and Dante’s cosmology. All three of Commedia’s realms, not just Hell’s axiomatic nine levels, are modeled on the idea of circles within circles. Hell’s levels descend from the largest to the smallest in a vast pit, each lower level representing a different, worse class of sinner. Purgatory is a terrestrial mountain, rising in levels to the point at which the purged soul, over eons, finally reaches the entrance to Elysium, or Paradise. Paradise, the cosmological and philosophical inversion of Hell, expands infinitely as a kind of amphitheater, its souls ranked by their closeness to the point that is God. Dante based his conception, part of it novel, on centuries of scientific and theological speculation from Ptolemy to Thomas Aquinas.

In the three parts of his ballet score, Adès mirrors Dante in moving from the claustrophobic, fretting energy of Hell through the striving, elongated time spans of Purgatory to the timeless, expansive wonder of Paradise. “Inferno,” not just because it’s first, has long been the most popular and the most interpreted of the three parts. In Hell we find extremes: lurid, skin-tingling descriptions of torture visited upon the very deserving next to empathy-inducing, tragic romances retold by some of its sufferers; allusions to Classical mythology and Christian orthodoxy eliding with workaday gossip and complaint touching on contemporary Florentine politics and life; and pathos next to biting satire. This mosaic gave Adès leeway in creating a score for Inferno that veers sharply among contrasting moods. In the ballet, Inferno is fully half of the evening-length work, its 13 movements touching on most of Hell’s realms of sin, along with focused movements for Charon, Ferryman of the underworld (from Classical mythology) and Francesca da Rimini with her lover Paolo (the basis of Tchaikovsky’s tone poem).

What the Inferno suite retains primarily is the sense of contrast and quick movement, though omitting from that description such juicy passages as “The Gluttons – in slime” and “The Deviants – crawling across burning sand.” The opening four movements remain. The Pilgrim’s panic at finding himself lost in a dark wood gives way to the buzzing irritations of the orchestra in Hell’s antechamber, where we encounter those without praise or blame whose lack of commitment has doomed them to an eternity without possibility, “stung by wasps.” In the ballet, the chamber-musical “Ferryman” movement, featuring English horn, is primarily a pas de deux with the Pilgrim and his guide, Virgil, looking on. In the deep melancholy of the “Pavan of the Souls in Limbo” we hear a clear musical “cycle,” a falling phrase repeated with small alterations that recalls passages in other Adès works. The phrase’s eddying reflects the permanent changelessness of the souls in Limbo, who by cosmic misfortune of birth were denied the chance to accept Christ and thus have no access to Paradise.

We move several levels downward to the comedic Adagio of the bad Popes, buried heads down in the Eighth Circle (Dante’s Canto XIX) for the sins of seeking temporal power or buying spiritual grace. There are mock-Viennese waltz touches here, reflecting the smarmy nature of the encounter, but soon we descend into conflict. The Pilgrim meets the Hypocrites in coats of lead: Tuba and trombones weigh down the fragments of scales that exhaustedly attempt their brief ascents. The touch of individual melancholy in solo cello seems to reflect the Pilgrim’s learning of the “future” defeat of the White Guelphs, his allies. There is humor value in the schadenfreude of the circus-polka-like next scene of Thieves being devoured by serpents—turning to ash upon being bitten, they immediately regenerate to die again in agony. The music itself is “stolen” from Franz Liszt, his Grand galop chromatique, blurred and smeared with orchestral detail as if reflecting the bitten souls’ regeneration. (The raucous atmosphere also recalls another rowdy infernal scene: that of the can-can in Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld.) In the final scene of “Inferno,” also the final scene of the ballet’s first act, we encounter in a lake of flaming ice Satan himself, whose great hairy legs Virgil and Dante painfully climb to reach the surface of the earth at the base of Purgatory.

—Robert Kirzinger  

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.