A Symphony to Dante's Divine Comedy, S.109, or simply the "Dante Symphony", is a choral symphony composed by Franz Liszt. Written in the high romantic style, it is based on Dante Alighieri's journey through Hell and Purgatory, as depicted in The Divine Comedy. It was premiered in Dresden in November 1857, with Liszt conducting himself, and was unofficially dedicated to the composer's friend and future son-in-law Richard Wagner. The entire symphony takes approximately 50 minutes to perform. It premiered on 7 November 1857.
Some critics have argued that the Dante Symphony is not so much a symphony in the classical sense as it is two descriptive symphonic poems. Regardless, Dante consists of two movements, both in a loosely structured ternary form with little use of thematic transformation.
Composition
Liszt had been sketching themes for the work since the early 1840s. The French poet Joseph Autran recalled that in summer 1845, Liszt improvised for him "a passionate and magnificent symphony upon Dante's Divine Comedy" on the organ of the empty Marseille Cathedral at midnight, and later invited Autran to collaborate with him on a Dante oratorio or opera, which the poet failed to pursue. In 1847, he played some fragments on the piano for his Polish mistress Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. At this early stage in the composition, it was Liszt's intention that performances of the work be accompanied by a slideshow depicting scenes from the Divine Comedy by the artist Bonaventura Genelli. He also planned to use an experimental wind machine to recreate the winds of Hell at the end of the first movement. Although Princess Carolyne was willing to defray the costs, nothing came of these ambitious plans and the symphony was set aside until 1855.
In June 1855, Liszt resumed work on the symphony and had completed most of it before the end of the following year. Thus, work on the Dante Symphony roughly coincided with work on Liszt's other symphonic masterpiece, the Faust Symphony, which was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's drama Faust. For this reason, and because they are the only symphonies Liszt ever composed (though certainly not his only symphonic works), the Dante and Faust symphonies are often recorded together.
In October 1856, Liszt visited Richard Wagner in Zürich and performed his Faust and Dante symphonies on the piano. Wagner was critical of the Dante Symphony fortissimo conclusion, which he thought was inappropriate as a depiction of Paradise. In his autobiography, he later wrote:
If anything had convinced me of the man's masterly and poetical powers of conception, it was the original ending of the Faust Symphony, in which the delicate fragrance of a last reminiscence of Gretchen overpowers everything, without arresting the attention by a violent disturbance. The ending of the Dante Symphony seemed to me to be quite on the same lines, for the delicately introduced Magnificat in the same way only gives a hint of a soft, shimmering Paradise. I was the more startled to hear this beautiful suggestion suddenly interrupted in an alarming way by a pompous, plagal cadence which, as I was told, was supposed to represent St Dominic.
"No!" I exclaimed loudly, "not that! Away with it! No majestic Deity! Leave us the fine soft shimmer!"
Liszt agreed and explained that such had been his original intention, but he had been persuaded by Princess Carolyne to end the symphony in a blaze of glory. He rewrote the concluding measures, but in the printed score, he left the conductor with the option of following the pianissimo coda with the fortissimo one.
Liszt's original intention was to compose the work in three movements: an Inferno, a Purgatorio and a Paradiso. The first two were to be purely instrumental, and the finale choral. Wagner, however, persuaded Liszt that no earthly composer could faithfully express the joys of Paradise. Liszt dropped the third movement but added a choral Magnificat at the end of the second movement. This action, some critics claim, effectively destroyed the work's balance, leaving the listener, like Dante, gazing upward at the heights of Heaven and hearing its music from afar. Moreover, Liszt scholar Humphrey Searle argues that while Liszt may have felt more at home portraying the infernal regions than the celestial ones, the task of portraying Paradise in music would not have been beyond his powers.