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 Francesca da Rimini, Op. 25, is a “symphonic opera” in a prologue, two tableaux and an epilogue by Sergei Rachmaninoff to a Russian libretto by Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky, based on the episode in Dante’s Inferno about the lovers Francesca and Paolo. Work began with the love duet in 1900 and was completed in 1905; the score was prepared for Rachmaninoff’s debut as a conducting composer at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

The score opens with Dante’s descent into the second circle of Hell, depicted through swirling orchestral textures and ominous minor‑second gestures. The Prologue and Epilogue employ wordless choral vocalise to suggest the spectral throng of the damned, while the central scenes contrast Malatesta’s turbulent monologues with Francesca and Paolo’s expansive duet, underpinned by leitmotifs that evoke both tenderness and doomed passion. The love duet itself spans some fifty bars of uninterrupted music, one of the longest such passages in the operatic repertoire, culminating in the lovers’ embrace before Lanceotto’s fatal intervention. Dramatic pacing is achieved through Rachmaninoff’s alternation of declamatory vocal writing and extended orchestral episodes, where themes recur in transformation to mirror the characters’ shifting fortunes.

The work’s musical language blends late‑Romantic lyricism with early‑20th‑century harmonic daring—chromatic inflections, semitone‑driven motifs and richly layered orchestration—yielding a vivid musical drama that remains a dramatic high point of Rachmaninoff’s stage works.