Dante
Apart from Beatrice
Dante Society (SA), Adelaide, 7 July 2024 The afternoon was an homage to ‘The Eternal Feminine,’ and Beatrice hardly got a mention. The Honourable Jing Lee MLC (below, centre) gave a pleasant ‘welcome to all countries’ in emphasis of the upside of multiculturalism, and then we heard from a number of authors from the Ascolta Women Inc. Collective (a creative writing workshop formed in 2020 under the shadow of Covid), to launch their latest anthology, Stories from La Terra, and they read out a few excerpts. Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554) (see main image in B/W) had an unhappy love affair with…
Continue Reading →Dante Defeats Disappointment
Image of Dante by Agnolo Bronzino
Giosuè Carducci (27 July 1835 to 16 February 1907) refused the Dante Chair in Rome because, among other things, he feared its politicisation, no doubt correctly. Yet it must have rankled because Carducci knew what many of the wise knew: that the life and work of Dante Alighieri is a miraculous example to all. In these times of artistic, financial, intellectual and moral bankruptcy, verged on a new theocratic age, it is salutary to consider this extract of Carducci’s poem to Dante: “Dante, how comes it that my vows I pay To thy proud image? Still I meditate The verse…
Continue Reading →Dante’s 750th
(Elder Hall, Adelaide University, 30/9/15) The Dante Society of SA gave a most agreeable concert to mark the 750th birthday of the Great Florentine, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Professor Diana Glenn gave two readings from The Divine Comedy – first from Paradiso, Canto XXIII, where Beatrice and Dante gaze up at the infinite sunbeams of redeemed souls, and Dante swoons (as he was wont to do). Then Mekhla Kumar (above) performed Liszt’s Sposalizio, inspired by Raphael’s The Marriage of the Virgin. Konstantin Shamray (below) played Liszt’s Dante Sonata with its slightly cartoonish swerve between the hell and heaven, with its different (hellish and celestial) keys…
Continue Reading →Requiem
SA Dante Society, 17 August 2015 At the Italian Centre on Monday evening the Society was treated to an early taste of Verdi’s tempestuous, mighty and dramatic requiem mass. This will be performed with full chorus and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra on 26 and 28 August, as conducted by Timothy Sexton. Maestro Dr Joseph Talia OAM gave a lucid and learned backgrounder, virtually extemporaneously, as to the sources, anxieties and influences on Verdi in the creation of this unique liturgical music, operatic in style and inspired by the life and death of Alessandro Manzoni, whom he revered. Verdi grappled with the…
Continue Reading →Dante and His World
"Men go to preach, and if they get a laugh their cowls puff up with pride. They ask no more." (Image Giotto, photo Wolfgang Sauber)
(By Thomas Caldecot Chubb) You might call this an inspired remaking of Dante’s life and thought through his art, with the eye of a poet and scholar, on intimate terms with Aretino, Boccaccio, Dante. Speculation, necessarily, as much as history but highly informed. We love the cover that tells us not only is Mr Chubb a graduate of Yale, but he “commutes between his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, and his plantation in southern Georgia.”
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