Carmelo Bene
Lectura Dantis

It was July 31, 1981.

To commemorate the victims of the massacre at the Bologna railway station, Carmelo Bene performs the "Lectura Dantis" and a page of great theater is written. I won’t be technical in this review, so I won't describe the cantos that Carmelo Bene declaims, nor will I talk about the structure of the disc. In this review, I want to be selfish and talk about my own feelings, therefore giving way to a subjective description of the work rather than an objective one.

When you listen to Bene’s voice, regardless of the texts he is reciting, you are enchanted. That vocal timbre, strong, sharp, vibrant, calm, manages to chain you to your seat, to throw you off, to captivate you. Even in the "Lectura Dantis", the words take on another form, they become music. Dante is spread to people who eagerly listen to those famous ancient words with rock concert amplifications. The Dantean cantos become music, they are recited not in a monotonous way but dynamically, they take shape in space, fill with air, can become light or heavy. Carmelo Bene was a master at this, ingenious, sublime, unruly. He was capable of dissecting the "Divine Comedy", a "must" of Italian literature, to give new life to the words, updating Dante’s drama to our present day. The Benian "lectura dantis" is a fundamental, revolutionary document, absolutely a must-have as a "unicum", since, I believe, there will never again be such an intense and heartfelt "lectura" as the one done by Carmelo Bene. The only "lectura dantis" perhaps on par is that of Gassmann, while Albertazzi’s is absolutely to be avoided, as unfortunately for him, he was clearly inferior to the two sacred monsters of Italian (and perhaps European) theater.

Carmelo Bene will continue these readings with rock concert amplifications and will always reap great success from the public (and critics), but certainly, it was the interpretation of some passages of Dante’s famous work that consecrated the Benian myth. Despite being very popular, Carmelo Bene is not (wasn't) well understood in Italy, his "theatrical approach" was too ahead of the times (and it is still too innovative for our times). For him, the mouth was a fundamental instrument, it wasn’t just needed to declaim verses but was important to color those verses, to scent them, to fill them with musicality. The word was violated, praised, stripped.

Bene’s language was not the same language we speak today and it was not the same language Italians spoke then. Bene’s language was made of signifiers where words flowed, slipped over you, shipwrecked.