I have been fond of Celtic music for many years, and within it one of my favorite artists is by far the Canadian singer, pianist and harpist Loreena McKennitt.<\/p>\n
Born in Morden in 1957, Loreena has a truly magical voice<\/strong> and her albums are full of experiences that she has been traveling through her travels around the world. All his work is in English, although one of her songs has also been recorded in Spanish<\/strong>, precisely the topic of which I am going to speak today: \"Dante's prayer.\"<\/p>\n There are very few songs that I can remember perfectly the day and the place where I heard them for the first time. This is one of them. It was January 6, 2000, if the memory does not fail me. The Magi had brought me a magnificent gift: a Loreena's double album entitled \"Live In Paris And Toronto\".<\/strong> The tracks of this album were recorded in concerts in those two cities, during a tour celebrated in 1998. The last song of the first disc was \"Dante's prayer\"<\/strong>, that had appeared for the first time in its album \"The Book of Secrets\", published in 1997. I remember that I was sitting on my bed when I first heard this song, and both the melody and the lyrics left me thrilled. But where did this issue come from?<\/p>\n A cold trip to a place that was a hell for many people<\/big><\/p>\n In the booklet of \"The Book of Secrets\"<\/a>, Loreena explained that this song had its origin in a trip on the Trans-Siberian, the longest railway line in the world (more than 9,200 kilometers).<\/strong> From that train, on December 17, 1995 Loreena wrote: \"It is now Day 5 on this train journey across wintry Siberia. Travelling alone, it is strange not to be able to have a conversation with anyone<\/strong>, but one learns how much can be conveyed through actions, body language, a look in the eye...\"<\/em> Another annotation appeared dated December 18: \"Dante\u2019s \u201cThe Divine Comedy\u201d keeps running through my mind as I gaze out at the landscape passing before me, thinking of the people who inhabit it<\/strong> and how they share this human condition... How has the West come to this place of transition? Are our lives really what they imagine?\"<\/em><\/p>\n Imagine for a moment the situation: at that time, it was four years since the fall of the Soviet Union.<\/strong> Siberia was an inhospitable place in which many people had died during the Stalinist deportations. In Siberia many fields of the Gulag were installed, which made it a hell for hundreds of thousands of human beings<\/strong>, with episodes as frightening as that of the Road of the Bones<\/a>. It was, without a doubt, a good place to remember the trip to hell that Dante made in the \"Divine Comedy\", and in the people that Loreena must have known on that trip, surely she perceived the same thirst for salvation that this song transmits.<\/p>\n You can hear in this video the first version of the song as it appeared in \"The Book of Secrets\":<\/strong><\/p>\n
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