Biography

Francesco Ciabattoni is Full Professor of Italian Literature and Director of Global Medieval studies at Georgetown University. After graduating from the Università di Torino, he received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University. His research focus lies on Dante and the middle ages, and the interplay of music and literature. He has published many essays on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Valla, Pasolini, Berto, and Italian songwriters. His latest monograph, Dante's Performance. Music, Dance, and Drama in the “Commedia", was published by De Gruyter in 2024. Among his other appointments are Book Review Co-Editor for Quaderni d'italianistica, Secretary of the American Boccaccio Association, and Councilor of the Dante Society of America.

Project Summary

Despite a substantive series of settings of Dante’s lyrics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, extant scholarship on Dante’s fortune in European Renaissance music is still somewhat limited. One important composition was Luca Marenzio’s 1599 madrigal “Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro,” which offers a wonderful example of “word painting,” the expressive use of textual setting in a madrigal counterpoint. Marenzio’s work circulated after thirty-seven years of intense musical activity on Dante’s lyrics which produced ten settings since 1562, all drawn from the Commedia. The complex style of Marenzio’s madrigal enhances the emotional and philosophical content of Dante’s lyrics. “Così nel mio parlar” remained Dante’s only text not drawn from the Commedia to be set to music up to the nineteenth century, and it stands at the antipodes of the Stilnovo and Vita nuova poetics, adopting dramatic and even brutally misogynistic tones against a “cruel” woman. Marenzio used a declamatory style developed from the Florentine Camerata and the incipient melodrama, creating a conceptual and musical bridge towards Claudio Monteverdi’s use of the Inferno in his 1607 Orfeo. Monteverdi’s masterwork marks both the end and the beginning of a musical era.