Francesca da Rimini, Symphonic Fantasy after Dante, Op. 32

Program notes

About the Work

In the summer of 1876 Tchaikovsky was travelling (to Bayreuth, where he attended the first complete Ring cycle and came away unconvinced by Wagner) and reading Dante. The fifth canto of the Inferno seized him: the story of Francesca da Rimini, the noblewoman married off to a deformed lord but in love with his handsome brother Paolo, the two of them discovered and murdered, and condemned for their adultery to be blown forever on a howling wind through the second circle of Hell. Tchaikovsky wrote that he was ‘inflamed’ with the desire to make a symphonic poem of it, and composed the score quickly that October and November in Moscow. He dedicated it to his friend and former pupil Sergei Taneyev.

Francesca da Rimini belongs to the genre of the symphonic fantasy or tone poem, orchestral music built around a literary subject, and it is among Tchaikovsky’s most viscerally dramatic orchestral works. It is also, not coincidentally, one of his most overtly emotional: the central love music pours out with the same ardour he would soon bring to the great ballets and symphonies, while the framing depiction of Hell gave him licence for some of his most violent and lurid orchestral writing. The first performance took place in Moscow on 9 March 1877, in a concert of the Russian Musical Society conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein, and it was an immediate success.

The piece is cast in a single span but falls clearly into three sections: a fearsome evocation of the infernal whirlwind, a tender central episode in which Francesca tells her story, and a return to the storm that engulfs the doomed lovers. Few works convey so directly Tchaikovsky’s lifelong theme: love crushed by an implacable fate.

What to Listen For

The opening plunges us straight into Dante’s Hell. Listen for the grim, groping introduction in the low strings and winds, the descent through the circles, before the music erupts into the whirlwind itself: a terrifying chromatic gale, strings and woodwind shrieking and spinning, that depicts the souls of the lustful tossed endlessly on the storm. It is some of the most graphic ‘weather’ music in the repertoire.

Then the wind dies down, and a long clarinet solo introduces the work’s emotional heart: Francesca’s narration. This great love theme, taken up and expanded by the strings, is pure Tchaikovsky: yearning, surging, heartbreakingly lyrical. It grows to an overwhelming climax as the lovers’ brief happiness is relived. But the reprieve cannot last. The whirlwind returns, fiercer than before, sweeping the love music away; listen for the shattering final bars, where crashing brass and a furious descent slam the gates of Hell shut on Paolo and Francesca for eternity.