Mediaevalia

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Even careful readers of the title page of this early-twentieth-century edition of Dante's Vita nuova, who may note that the work is not only "translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti" but also "pictured by Evelyn Paul with music by Alfred Mercer," will likely be surprised by the musical staves that occupy five continuous pages of the book (Fig. 1).¹ The staves are not, of course, medieval. Not only is the musical notation modern, but no medieval music survives for Dante's poetry. Indeed, there is little evidence of any musical settings for Italian poetry until the second half of the Trecento. We do, however, have some suggestions about performance, such as Casella singing Dante's "Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona" ("Love that reasons in my mind") in Purgatorio 2, and some stories in the Decameron (3.7 and 10.7) where the circulation of songs plays an important role.² One reason for the absence of these musical settings is likely the so-called "divorce" between music and poetry that characterizes early Italian poetry.³ Whereas in the French tradition, the composition of poetry and the composition of music can be embodied in a single figure such as Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377), in Italy, poets composed the words but not the music to which their poems were performed. Italian poems could certainly be performed, but such performances were usually subsequent to their written composition. The link between poetry and song, moreover, appears to break down at an early moment: the earliest Italian poems, which emerged from Sicily, seem to be the products of a primarily written and therefore highly literary tradition. The fact that one of the earliest collections of Italian vernacular poetry (Vat. lat. 3793) begins with Giacomo da Lentini's "Madonna, dir vo voglio" ("My lady, I want to tell you"), a translation of Folquet de Marseille's Occitan "A vos, midontç, voill retrair'en cantan" ("To you, my lady, I want to describe in song"), underlines this point: we are dealing with the production and transformation of written documents that are performed on the page, not with the human voice.⁴

Mercer's musical setting may be a modern confection, but it is no less interesting for being fake. One could interpret it as part of a medievalist impulse that motivates the whole edition, with its decorative frames and ornaments that suggest what a medieval manuscript should look like.⁵ From this perspective, putting Dante's ballata into musical staves would project onto Dante's work an association of medieval poetry and song that may not fit Italian literary history, but seems properly medieval.⁶ The modern print edition thus aims to recover and replicate in translation a song that was most likely never intended to be sung. [End Page 300]

In this paper, I argue that the music in this edition is not only a projection of early-twentieth-century ideas of the medieval manuscript, but also a response to Dante's complex presentation of the ballata in the Vita nuova, where the poem is a response to the crisis precipitated by Beatrice denying Dante her greeting. The attention that this edition dedicates to the ballata as song invites readers to consider the form of the ballata and its mode of being: Is it a poem or a song? Dante raises this question by addressing the poem directly from its very first line, "Ballata i' voi che tu ritrovi Amore [Ballad, I want you to go find Love]." This direct address to the poem, which, as we will see, also confused medieval scribes, foreshadows the eventual solution to the crisis described in the ballata, a solution that Dante achieved in the canzone "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore." The canzone...