A cello delays sound, hurry how it may. Ask Brahms—he knows it. Ask Dante—he has heard it.

Ugolino’s narrative is one of Dante’s most significant arias, one of those instances when a man, who has been given a unique, never-to-be-repeated chance to be heard out, is completely transformed under the eyes of his audience, plays like a virtuoso on his unhappiness, draws out of his misfortune a timbre never before heard and unknown even to himself.

It must be remembered that timbre is a structural principle, like the alkalinity or the acidity of this or that chemical compound. The retort is not the space in which the chemical reaction occurs. This would be much too simple.

The cello voice of Ugolino, overgrown with a prison beard, starving and confined with his three fledgling sons, one of whom bears a sharp, violin name, Anselmuccio, pours out of the narrow slit:

Breve pertugio dentro dalla muda,30

(Inferno, XXXIII, 22)

—it ripens in the box of the prison resonator—here the cello’s fraternization with the prison is no joking matter.

Il carcere—the prison supplements and acoustically conditions the verbalizing work of the autobiographic cello.

Prison has played an outstanding role in the subconscious of the Italian people. Nightmares of prison were imbibed with the mother’s milk. The trecento threw men into prison with an amazing unconcern. Common prisons were open to the public, like churches or our museums. The interest in prisons was exploited by the jailers themselves as well as by the fear-instilling apparatus of the small states. Between the prison and the free world outside there existed a lively intercourse, resembling diffusion—the process of osmosis.

Hence the story of Ugolino is one of the migratory anecdotes, a bugaboo with which mothers frighten children—one of those amusing horrors which are pleasurably mumbled through the night as a remedy for insomnia, as one tosses and turns in bed. By way of ballad it is a well-known type, like Bürger’s Lenore, the Lorelei, or the Erlkönig.

In such a guise, it corresponds to the glass retort, so accessible and comprehensible irrespective of the quality of the chemical process taking place within.

But the largo for cello, proffered by Dante on behalf of Ugolino, has its own space and its own structure, which are revealed in the timbre. The ballad-retort, along with the general knowledge of it, is smashed to bits. Chemistry takes over with its architectonic drama.

“Io non so chi tu se’, nè per che modo

venuto se ‘qua giù; ma fiorentino

mi sembri veramente quand’ io t’odo.

Tu dei saper ch’i ’fui conte Ugolino.”

(Inferno, XXXIII, 10–13)

“I do not know who you are or how you came down here, but by your speech you seem to me a real Florentine. You ought to know that I was Ugolino.”

“You ought to know”—tu dei saper—the first stroke on the cello, the first out-thrusting of the theme.

The second stroke: “If you do not burst out weeping now, I know not what can wring tears from your eyes.”

Here are opened up the truly limitless horizons of compassion. What is more, the compassionate one is invited in as a new partner, and already his vibrating voice is heard from the distant future.

However, it wasn’t by chance I mentioned the ballad: Ugolino’s narrative is precisely a ballad in its chemical make-up, even though it is confined in a prison retort. Present are the following elements of the ballad: the conversation between father and sons (recall the Erlkönig), the pursuit of a swiftness that slips away, that is—continuing the parallel with the Erlkönig—in one instance a mad dash with his trembling son in arms, in the other, the situation in prison, that is, the counting of trickling tempi, which bring the father and his three sons closer to the threshold of death by starvation, mathematically imaginable, but to the father’s mind unthinkable. It is the same rhythm of the race in disguise—in the dampened wailing of the cello, which is struggling with all its might to break out of the situation and which presents an auditory picture of a still more terrible, slow pursuit, decomposing the swiftness into the most delicate fibers.

Finally, in just the way the cello eccentrically converses with itself and wrings from itself questions and answers, Ugolino’s story is interpolated with his sons’ touching and helpless interjections:

. . . ed Anselmuccio mio

disse: “Tu guardi sì, padre: che hai?”

(Inferno, XXXIII, 50–51)

. . . and my Anselmuccio said:

“Father, why do you look so? What is the matter?”

That is, the timbre is not at all sought out and forced onto the story as onto a shoemaker’s last, but rather the dramatic structure of the narrative arises out of the timbre.

VIII.

It seems to me that Dante has carefully studied all speech defects, that he has listened to stutterers and lispers, to whiners and mispronouncers, and that he has learned a good deal from them.

So I should like to speak about the auditory coloring in Canto XXXII of the Inferno.

A peculiar labial music: abbo, gabbo, babbo, Tebe, plebe, zebe, converrebbe. As if a wet-nurse were taking part in the creation of the phonetics. Lips now protrude like a child’s, now are distended into a proboscis.

The labials form a kind of “enciphered bass”—basso continuo, that is, the chordal basis of harmonization. They are joined by smacking, sucking, whistling dentals as well as by clicking and hissing ones.

At random, I pull out a single strand: cagnazzi, riprezzo, quazzi, mezzo, gravezza . . .

Not for a second do the tweakings, the smacking, and the labial explosions cease.

The canto is sprinkled with a vocabulary that I would describe as an assortment of seminary ragging or of the blood thirsty taunting-rhymes of schoolboys: cuticagna (“nape”); dischiomi (“pull out hair, locks of hair”); sonar con le mascella (“to yell,” “to bark”); pigliare a gabbo (“to brag,” “to loaf”). With the aid of this deliberately shameless, intentionally infantile orchestration, Dante forms the crystals for the auditory landscape of Giudecca (Judas’ circle) and Caina (Cain’s circle).

Non fece al corso suo sì grosso velo

d’inverno la Danoia in Osteric,

nè Tanaì là sotto il freddo cielo,

com’era quivi: chè, se Tambernic

vi fosse su caduto, o Pietrapana,

non avrìa pur dall’orlo fatto cric.31

(Inferno, XXXII, 25–30)

All of a sudden, for no reason at all, a Slavonic duck sets up a squawk: Osteric, Tambernic, cric (an onomatopoeic little word—“crackle”).

Ice produces a phonetic explosion and it crumbles into the names of the Danube and the Don. The cold-producing draught of Canto XXXII resulted from the entry of physics into a moral idea: from betrayal to frozen conscience to the ataraxy of shame to absolute zero.

In tempo, Canto XXXII is a modern scherzo. But what kind? An anatomic scherzo that uses the onomatopoeic infantile material to study the degeneration of speech.

A new link is revealed here: between feeding and speaking. Shameful speaking can be turned back, is turned back to champing, biting, gurgling, to chewing.

The articulation of feeding and speaking almost coincide. A strange, locust phonetics is created.

Mettendo i denti in nota di cicogna—

(Inferno, XXXII, 36)

—using their teeth like grasshoppers’ mandibles.

Finally, it is necessary to note that Canto XXXII is overflowing with anatomical lustfulness.

“That same famous blow which simultaneously destroyed the wholeness of the body and injured its shadow.” There, too, with a purely surgical pleasure: “He whose jugular vertebra was chopped through by Florence.”

Di cui segò Fiorenza la gorgiera.

(Inferno, XXXII, 120)

And further: “Like a hungry man who greedily falls on bread, one of them fell on another and sank his teeth into the place where the neck and the nape join.”

Là’ve ‘l cervel s’aggiugne colla nuca.

(Inferno, XXXII, 129)

All this jigs like a Dürer skeleton on hinges and takes us to German anatomy.

After all, a murderer is a bit of an anatomist.

After all, for the Middle Ages an executioner was a little like a scientific researcher.

The art of war and the trade of execution are a bit like a dissection amphitheater’s antechamber.

IX.

The Inferno is a pawnshop where all the countries and towns known to Dante lie unredeemed. There is a framework for the very powerful structure of the infernal circles. It cannot be conveyed in the form of a funnel. It cannot be represented on a relief map.