Francesca da Rimini

On the work He was touted as the new star in Italy’s operatic firmament around 1910. Publisher Tito Ricordi had big plans for the young Riccardo Zandonai and was sparing no cost to achieve the same triumphs with him as Giulio Ricordi had done a generation earlier with the young Puccini. For a huge fee, Ricordi secured the rights to a scandalous contemporary play - Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 5-act drama “Francesca da Rimini” – which had created a stir with its bloody civil-war scenes, cruel passions and adulterous couple. D’Annunzio’s fin-de-siècle-esque “poem of blood and lust” was all the rage in artist circles. The 31-year-old Riccardo Zandonai spied his chance to pen a florid opera of grandiose scale in a musical language fusing a raft of styles and epochs. And sure enough, Zandonai ploughs his individual European furrow of musical theatre, encompassing Italian bel canto, hints of Renaissance madrigals, gritty verismo, pre-Fascist marches, Wagner’s TRISTAN as a point of reference and a French Impressionism à la Debussy. The story revolves around three brothers in love with the same woman. Francesca da Polenta, from Ravenna, is being forced into a marriage of convenience to a scion of the Malatesta family in Rimini. The intended groom, Giovanni, is old and unattractive and reluctant to risk rejection by wooing the maid face-to-face, so he sends his handsome brother Paolo as a front, whereupon the unwitting Francesca falls in love with wrong man and signs the marriage contract. Time passes and Francesca, living in unhappy wedlock with Giovanni, embarks on a passionate affair with Paolo. She is presented as both victim and perpetrator, as a lover with a death wish and also a powerful seductress, whom the third brother falls for, too. The facets of this complex and contradictory character run the gamut of emotions “between roses and violent fantasies” (Christof Loy), between total devotion and destructive erotic forces in a cruel and cunning world controlled by men. On ...