Dante's Inferno Done Classically 

Dante's Inferno has been referenced in other books, plays, movies, and even video games since being written. But a challenge that has proved to be hard to overcome by creative and great minds alike is putting the story that is found in Dante's Inferno into a classical symphony orchestra. To transfer an epic work of literature such as The Divine Comedy into a musical masterpiece is no easy feat. Many have tried to do such things but only a few have been successful in bringing the general feel and passion of the words into music.

The two composers that are renown for their success in this area are Liszt and Rachmaninoff. The appeal that Dante's work brought to composers is the way his words flowed and had the occasional rhyme. If read in the original Italian, the poem has quite a flow to it and that is something that Dante was praised for. Though in many modern translations, the Italian words cannot equivalently express the structure that Dante's genius constructed.

The two composers, Liszt and Rachmaninoff, approached this in two different ways. Liszt, who appreciated Dante's style of flow, created a masterpiece without using any specific text from Dante in his symphony. Instead, he created a symphony which flowed and went up in down in both pitch and volume according to how Dante's journey went. For instance, the beginning of the symphony is slow and erie (just as the scene seems to be when Dante finds himself in the wood and confused), and then it continues to get louder and faster (as Dante encounters Nicholas III in Hell for instance, or when Virgil and Dante are at the gates of Dis). Liszt wanted to show his audiences that there is in fact a way to make not a soundtrack, but a comparable experience to the work of Dante itself.

Rachmaninoff on the other played majorly on the part of Dante's epic that focused on Paolo and Francesca. For even though Dante created this example in his work, it has clung to the minds and hearts of all of those who have read the novel. Rachmaninoff uses direct text, announcing the scenes in which the music pertains to in between each act of his symphony. He believed that if the audience was prompted with information on which the music pertained to, then they would better understand it.

Both of these composers successfully captured the essence of Dante's work in their musical pieces. This should be viewed as a strong achievement because though there have been many attempts to do so, these are the most successful composers to do so. Here is the beginning of Liszt's Dante's Symphony, while here is Rachmaninoff's work on the Inferno.