Francesca da Rimini

Modest Tchaikovsky wrote the libretto, after the fifth canto of Dante's Inferno, and Rachmaninoff worked at the one-act opera on and off between 1900 and 1905, delayed by the libretto's slow arrival and by his conducting duties at the Bolshoi. He conducted the premiere there on 24 January 1906, on a double bill with his other Pushkin-era one-acter, The Miserly Knight. The score frames the lovers' single duet with a wordless chorus of the damned, and it is those outer scenes, rather than the brief central episode, that carry the work.