The paper aims at discussing the structure of Francesca da Rimini op. 32, a symphonic poem inspired on Canto V do Inferno (1307) from Divina Comédia of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) in 1876. Tchaikovsky uses Dante's poetic text as a source to develop a musical narrative that leads the listener to other planes of the sensitive. In Francesca, Tchaikovsky does not follow the story, but creates, from it, his own. The key to the compositional structure of the work seems to be the mimesis: if Dante describes what he "sees" in the reality of his fiction, Tchaikovsky describes what he feels in the reality of the space-time of music.
Tchaikovsky; romanticism in music; music and literature; representation and mimesis
