The Divine Comedy in Seven Days

Music by Ole Malmgren
Italian libretto from La Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri

English translation by Mary Jo Bang

The Opera Project

After working on operas and musicals for many years, in late 2019, I decided to explore working on something in Italian. That’s when I happened upon Dante’s Divine Comedy. After realizing how much material there was on the Comedy, I spent some months researching various translations, biographies, books of commentary, etc. and, at some point, I decided to begin working on this opera

Dante’s Divine Comedy

Dante divided his Comedy into three volumes: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). He invented a complex, interlocking rhyme scheme, referred to as terza rima, for his poem: the first and third lines of each three-line stanzas rhyme, while the non-rhyming middle line becomes the basis for the rhyme for the first and third lines of the next tercet. In other words: aba bcb cdc, etc. For Dante, the triune nature of the rhyme echoed both the Christian Trinity and the formal devices of the Provençal Troubadour poets whose poems he admired.

The setting for Dante’s poem is Easter week, in the year 1300. Inferno begins just before the dawn of Good Friday—April 8^th by the calendar—and Paradiso ends at midnight of 14^th April—so, seven days in all. It was for that reason that I decided to title the opera The Divine Comedy in Seven Days. I have been working on the project now for five years and have, at present, about 1.400 score pages and small 10 hours of music.

The Days of Inferno and Purgatorio are finished. Setup is choir, 4 main solo parts, a number of minor solo parts (to be chosen from choir), and orchestra.

Dante in Music

What I have done is to take fifteen to thirty verses from each canto and use them to create dialogues of three or more verses. For each line of text, I look for technical support from two sources: Word Separation—korrekturen.de/worttrennung/it—and Pronunciation—translate.google.com (speaking facility). These two sources have made it possible to select Italian words (or series of words)—based on tempo, rhythm, syllabic stress, and dramatic mood—and match those words to the musical notes.

Translation

Today, for any operatic performance, translation is needed for the electronic libretto screen. While the opera is sung in Dante’s original medieval Tuscan Italian, I chose English for the translation.

At the same time, I wanted to better understand the poem and began to look for supplementary material about the background of the poem, the various characters in it and their place in history. I discovered a review of Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Purgatorio—published by Graywolf Press in 2021. Through that review, I learned that Bang’s translation of Inferno had been published by Graywolf in 2012.

After an email conversation about the project, Bang put me in touch with Graywolf, who granted permissions to use the translation for my opera. Bang’s Paradiso is scheduled for publication with Graywolf in 2025, in time to be included in the project.

The advantage of using Bang’s translation is that she has translated the poem into colloquial English—which will make the text more accessible to an audience.

Ole Malmgren

March 2025.

Demo videos: