True crimes are particularly gripping — though is anything “true” after an operatic librettist has gotten done with it? Dig far enough back in history and it’s hard to remember any longer what’s true and what’s not. Take Francesca da Rimini, a 13th-century Italian noblewoman who was unlucky in marriage, doomed in love, and fortunate in her choice of chroniclers. What really happened, as far as we know it, is that she, subjected to a political marriage with an unattractive man, started a lengthy affair with his better-looking (and also married) younger brother. The wronged husband eventually caught and killed them both. Dante, in his “Divine Comedy,” placed the doomed lovers in the second circle of hell, battered by wailing winds and intertwined for all eternity, and he created such a compelling portrait of undying love that Paolo and Francesca went down in Western cultural history as one of the great icons of romantic love. They have inspired symphonic tone poems by Tchaikovsky and others, paintings by artists such as everyone from Botticelli to Ingres to Dante Gabriel Rosetti, no fewer than three sculptures by Rodin, including his famous “The Kiss” — and more than 18 operas.  Writing an opera about adultery, in this context, involves a great bait-and-switch, because while adultery was once a crime, love is not. Love, in fact, is supreme in Western culture: we are told that it is synonymous with God, that it conquers all, that it has its own laws, and that in its pure form it is one of the greatest things to which man can aspire. So a story about two adulterers can at once titillate and uplift: the passion outweighs the crime. Paolo and Francesca’s love extends beyond the grave, and when Dante, as protagonist of his poem, encounters them, he is so overwhelmed by pity and sympathy that he falls down in a faint. Artists ever since have been making various cases, in their works, for Paolo and Francesca’s exoneration — to the point that the sin itself, the actual act of consummation, is almost entirely glossed over.  It is, in fact, a literary seduction. The key moment, as Dante recounts it, came when the pair were reading, together, the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and, overcome by the romance of the story, emulated it. Francesca, in her retelling, castigates the guilty book as a “Galeotto,” an Italianization of Galehaut, the knight who enabled Lancelot and Guinevere to meet: the book was responsible for their downfall. It’s a significant moment in Western literature, acknowledging the power of a text to lead the reader to good or ill — demonstrating, in short, the potent and dangerous link between literature and reality. That fat beach book on the towel beside you can be a portal to all kinds of trouble. Isn’t that just what we want, what we secretly hope for? Even Dante’s immediate successors didn’t think that this kind of power was necessarily a bad thing. A few decades after the “Divine Comedy,” Giovanni Boccaccio gave his “Decameron” the secondary title “Prince Galehaut”; his book, known for its licentiousness, was supposed to enable the very kinds of behavior that brought about Paolo and Francesca’s downfall.  At the same time, if all Paolo and Francesca did was read together — however juicy the implications of Francesca’s concluding line in Dante, “That day, we read no further” — there is a sense of chastity to their story. Rodin’s “The Kiss” is perhaps the epitome of the story’s implicit blend of sensuality and purity; the sculpture is at once a visceral, powerful presentation of physical love and, it’s sometimes said, an image of coitus interruptus, since the couple’s lips are not touching (the book is still clutched in the man’s hand).  And this lingering question, the drawn curtain, the trace of unfulfillment is one reason this story is ideally suited for opera. Opera is better at yearning than consummation; its lovers are often doomed (though there are plenty of counterexamples to each claim). One of the greatest love stories in opera, “Tristan und Isolde,” is similarly unconsummated, at least onstage, though it’s been argued that the lovers could have been snatching stolen meetings for some time by the time they get to their great interrupted love duet in Act II.  Opera is also fond of defending the honor of its heroines. Many of the operatic treatments of Francesca’s story embrace the claim, begun by Boccaccio only a few decades after the fact, that Francesca was effectively tricked into marriage by being presented with Paolo in the guise of her future husband, only to have his brother revealed in his stead at the wedding. This angle features in the one-act “Francesca da Rimini” opera by Rachmaninoff as well as the “Francesca da Rimini” by Zandonai, the only Francesca opera to retain a foothold in the standard repertory (the Metropolitan Opera did it as recently as 2013). Historically inaccurate it may be, but it underlines the case for Francesca as victim rather than perpetrator.  And she was, of course, the victim — the victim of a murder. Dante leaves no question about which is the worse crime; Francesca’s killer will be found, he’s told, not in the second but in the ninth circle of Hell, at the very bottom of the moral totem pole. Dante’s universe didn’t allow for moral ambiguity. Not so, of course, the morally dubious world of art, which is filled with accidental and repentant murderers. Even history offers a few — like the wildly eccentric Gesualdo di Venosa, a 17th-century nobleman and composer who surprised and killed his adulterous wife and her lover. In 1993, Gesualdo became the subject of an opera by Alfred Schnittke. In the wake of all the attention showered on Paolo and Francesca in the 19th and early 20th centuries by artists celebrating the power of their work to incite love, can an opera about Francesca’s husband be far behind?
Adultery, rape, and lots of murder. Washington Post dance, music and art critics examine the fascination with crimes of passion.