Matt Malsky : Composer

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Putting the Devil in Hell

Full recording:

recording from The Three Arts Club, Flash in the Pan Ensemble

Program Notes
For the modern reader, Boccaccio's Decameron has become nearly synonymous with medieval bawdry and blasphemy: tale after tale of monks and nuns doing what they shouldn't with scandalous abandon. The true morall scope of Boccaccio's seemingly pornographic compendium is lost on the connoisseur of erotica, no less than on the censor. "Putting the Devil in Hell" (III, 10) is a case in point. On the simplest level, the plot metes out comic justice to the spiritualy abmitious Rustico, who fails not only as a would-be St. Anthony, but also, having succumbed (rapidly!) to temptation, as a would-be lecher. So much for the correction of indiviudal foibles, yet in a more subtle way the tale addresses a weakness in the ascetic attitude in general: its condemnation of the sexual act as the focus of sin. Originally a monastic ideal, ascetic contempt for material creation and sexuality in particular had gained general currency during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, popularized by such writings as Innocent the III's De Contemptu Mundi (rendered by Chaucer, suggestively as "Wreccid Engendering"). Boccaccio writes from the contending position of late medieval naturalism, a school of thought that may be traced back through Jean de Meun's immensely popular and controversial Roman de la Rose to the 12th century "humanists" Alanus de Insulis and Bernardus Silvestris. These writers took up the defense of the natural order as God-designed and so essentially good, and of the generative organs, in particular, as tools in Nature's ceaseless struggle with universal death. Only with this intellectual background in mind can we appreciate the real value of Boccacio's endless variation on the erotic theme; set against the Florentine plague of 1348, the tales act more as procreative exhortations than as the decadent diversions many imagine them to be. To underestimate the power and importance of Nature's generative instruments, or to misname them out of prudery or prurience, is to invite exactly the lesson that Rustico must learn from his intended "student" Alibech. Though unenlightened by grace, the young pagan is intuitively adept at Nature's doctrine, and so is able, in all innocence, to seize the truth in Rustico's attempt at deception: "putting the devil in hell" is indeed most acceptable to God. Just as Alibech emerges triumphant and none-the-worse-for-wear, and finally finds a better way to "serve God" with a husband, the sexual act itself resists both the contempt of the ascetic and the perversity of the sinner. Sin, Boccacio suggests, originates in the mind and will, not in the blameless instruments, and to preach otherwise is to stand self-accused.

notes by Pamela Barrie

Performance History