Above are links to a four part video of a musical interpretation of Dante’s Inferno. The entire production is approximately 45 minutes, and is a complete reenactment of the entirety of Inferno. It was written/composed, directed, staged, and produced by a pair of high school students who were particularly inspired by the Comedy about a year ago. The entire video is worth a watch, as the book is pretty comical, and the music tends to be pretty catchy.
The show begins with an austerely dressed Dante, singing an opening number, when he is approached by a character who turns out to be Vergil. For the remainder of the show, the two travel through the depths of Hell, descending circle by circle, and encountering each individual character that appears. In most cases, they sing a quick little number, or perhaps just have a short comical interaction, but the pair actually passes through the eighth circle of Hell fairly quickly; they move from bolgia to bolgia, observing the inhabitants of each. For this particular section, I can’t say I really enjoyed the music behind the passage. The humor, as well, was a bit crass. However, they did catch all the important information from each bolgia, the sins punished, and a bunch of the characters presented.
The entire production is an interesting interpretation, because, as I talked about a bit in my post about the song inspired by Dante’s Inferno, the Comedy is a piece that holds a lot of power through speech; it is often very reminiscent of the ancient world tradition of plays. In this musical, it captures this culture of performance, as well as pulls the content into a musical setting, which is representative of the nature of Dante’s own language through his epic poem.
In addition to this, the musical is very frequently cheesy and ostentatious. This touches on a lot of the satiric content that Dante plays with, as well as the undertones of sarcasm that Dante inserts every once in a while. Musicals, even in modern culture, are somewhat mocked for their unrealistic tendency to incorporate music into social scenarios that don’t necessarily need them, and, in this case, this musical tends to insert this music at unimportant pieces of the Inferno, in my opinion. For example, the interpretation of Dante and Vergil’s encounter with Francesca da Rimini and her lover, Paolo, in the circle of lust, is short and topical. Francesca has a brief dialogue with the pair, and Dante subsequently faints. Though this is somewhat what occurs in the actual Inferno, there are a lot of really important references missed by the brevity of that interaction.
So, in totality, the piece is not the most profound interpretation of the Comedy, but it can be fun to watch and has a bit of fun lines to pay attention to. The austere feeling of the entire performance does draw attention to the lines/lyrics of the characters, which is what Dante really intended; it was not for the reader to see Inferno as he saw it, but rather how he describes it.
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