Dante’s works contain a wealth of musical references, and his linguistic treatise, De vulgari eloquentia, is an invaluable source of knowledge regarding the performance practice of contemporary lyric poetry. Despite these indisputable facts, several scholars have cast doubt on Dante’s actual musical knowledge, and the extent to which we can interpret his references to musical performance as representing historical practice. This paper explores the issue of musical performance of lyric poems, both by Dante and as represented within Dante’s works. It addresses the question of Dante’s first-hand experience of melodic delivery of lyric poems, the meanings of musical terms in De vulgari eloquentia, Dante’s thoughts on sung performance and its relationship with texts, and every instance in which there is a suggestion that a poem by Dante was sung during his lifetime.
Our current conception of the history of the early Italian lyric tradition is heavily informed by Dante's works, and in particular his De vulgari eloquentia. 1 It has not always been the case. Before the rediscovery of this text in the early sixteenth century, other works were far more influential in presenting authors who made up Italian vernacular literature and offering judgments on them.Among these writings, a prominent position must be accorded to Petrarch's works, above all the list of vernacular love poets found in Triumphus Cupidinis (IV 28-42), alongside the mention of five of these in the sonnet on death of one of them, Sennuccio del Bene (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 287).Such passages continue to be relevant well into the sixteenth century, and they also play a key role in Poliziano's introductory Epistola to the Raccolta Aragonese. 2 That Epistolaas is well knownrepresents one of the most important late Quattrocento contributions to the historical assessment of the earlier vernacular poetic tradition, and it continued to be influential well into the sixteenth century. 3 This essay is concerned with texts that precede Poliziano's Epistola and that have not been closely examined for the information and judgments they provide on the earlier This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 840772.
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