Description

After being set to music by the madrigalists of the late Renaissance, Dante entered a purgatory from which he was not to emerge until the early nineteenth century. In 1805, Nicola Zingarelli’s Canto XXXIII di Dante inaugurated a long series of compositions based on the works of the Florentine writer. Nevertheless, only a part of his oeuvre appealed to the Romantic sensibility: composers almost always chose the Divine Comedy; and in that magnum opus, their preference went to the Inferno, from which they most often extracted the tragic love story of Francesca da Rimini (Canto V).