1931: The Earliest Seuss in Hardcovers

 By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

October 13, 2014

In 1931, well before Theodor Seuss Geisel published the childrens’ books for which he achieved his fame, he was drawing ads for Flit insect spray and publishing cartoons in magazines, most notably Life and the long-defunct humor and satire magazine Judge.  This exposure prompted an editor at Viking Press to call Seuss and offer him the chance to illustrate an American edition of something that had been called Schoolboy Howlers in Britain.  Seuss’s first illustrated childrens’ book, And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was still five years in the future.  Seuss (who still in those days pronounced his name in good German fashion to rhyme with “voice” instead of “moose”) ended up illustrating two volumes for Viking Press, titled Boners (which came out in  February, 1931) and More Boners, which appeared that April.   According to Judith & Neil Morgan’s book Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel, the original Boners “swept through four printings in two months to lead The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list.”  Buoyed by this success, Seuss tried to sell Viking on his idea to write and illustrate an alphabet book using very strange animals to illuminate the ABC’s, but Viking didn’t bite, and it would be twenty-four more years (1955) before Seuss would put out the closest thing to his old idea in On Beyond Zebra!

The Boners books were collections of purportedly authentic bloopers from classrooms and exam papers of school-children.  These were allegedly submitted by teachers and others for consideration, and the editor would choose the most hilarious ones for inclusion in the books.  There were four Boners books from February, 1931, to March, 1932, the first two illustrated by Seuss and the others credited to Virginia Huget.  They must have been very popular, because not only did they show up on the best-seller lists, various omnibus editions of the books were packaged and re-packaged over the years. In fact, some of the unintentional puns, youthful but unintended wisdom, and malapropisms that appear in the Boners books have become somewhat legendary.  A book from 2007 called Must Try Harder! The Very Worst Howlers by Schoolchildren includes a lot of the boners (“howlers” in Britain) from the Boners books alongside newer, more modern ones.  

 Many of the funniest jokes simply substitute an incorrect word for a correct word.  Thus, we are given the observation:  “Adolescence is the stage between puberty and adultery.”  A simple word substitution can have the effect of causing a child to make what seems like a very adult observation, such as:  “In Christianity, a man can only have one wife.  This is called Monotony.”  Another rather adult observation in the same vein:  “The Bible is against bigamy when it says that no man can serve two masters.”  Often these “boners” have the unintended, but hilarious, effect of turning innocent school-child mistakes into rather ribald jokes.  For example:  “A census taker is a man who goes from house to house increasing the population.”  Sometimes, a child just gets things backwards, as in:  “1066 is in the ninth century because centuries always for some reason or other fall back one.”  Other times, a child, not knowing the correct test answer, is just innocently honest:  to the request “Write what you know of the Last Supper” one child answered, “I was away for that.  I had the measles.” And sometimes, a child can just cut to the chase like no adult ever could:  when asked “Where was the Declaration of Independence signed?,” the answer given was “At the bottom.”  

 An unintended effect of the Boners books is to show those intellectuals among us today how deprived our children are in the era of “No Child Left Behind” (read: EVERY child left behind), which is also the era of teaching to the standardized exam to the detriment of all else.  The school-children of 1931 who wrote the “boners” may not have understood everything they were being taught in school, but there was at least an attempt being made to expose the material to them. These children were studying (and yes, making lots of funny mistakes along the way) topics as diverse as classical history and mythology, science, mathematics, religion, literature, and more.  Most schoolchildren today couldn’t read the Boners books and laugh, because modern education has not provided them with a matrix for interpreting the humor.  And that is lamentable.  

Victorian Artisan/Author/Activist: William Morris (1834-1896)

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

The Dalenberg Library blog was created (in part) to highlight unique books, or forgotten books, or collectible editions in the Library.  I have often digressed from that task to discuss music or art or films.  But I have a lot of un-read books in this Library to discover before I die, so it is time to start reporting on them here.  

J.R.R. Tolkien has always been central to my reading mission in life.  Back in the 1970’s, when my young mind was fascinated by the discovery of Tolkien, Ballantine Books set about re-discovering and re-publishing many of the great (but mostly neglected) works that had preceded Tolkien, under the imprint of their Adult Fantasy series, the ones edited by Lin Carter and bearing the unicorn colophon.  Together, these books form a core to the Dalenberg Library fantasy collection.  We at the Dalenberg Library detest many of the post-Tolkien “fat fantasy” books published in trilogies, and tetralogies, and other over-lengthy series formats.  We think most of those authors could use an editor.  But we love Tolkien and pre-Tolkien (and a few select later science fiction/fantasy hybrids, such as the works of Gene Wolfe.)  

Dalenberg Library copies of 1970 Ballantine Adult Fantasy 2-volume paperback edition of “The Well at the World’s End.”  Best taken in small doses, Morris’s prose is rife with archaisms and quasi-medieval diction, much like those two other great pre-Tolkien fantasists, E.R. Eddison and Lord Dunsany.

William Morris (1834-1896) stands tall as a founder of modern adult fantasy fiction (meaning, fantasy as a literary sub-type that has moved beyond fairy tales), although he is almost never read today. Morris’s writings had a profound impact on Tolkien in his early days.  That impact is indelibly evident in Tolkien’s earliest stabs at fantasy fiction, writings that preceded The Hobbit, which have come to light in the years since Tolkien passed away and the effort began to publish every scrap of his tales in every stage of their evolution.  As for Morris, his collected works, published between 1910 and 1915, run to 24 volumes.  They are once again available from the Cambridge Library Collection (re-published in October, 2012).  I would like to say that I own the collection, but that would require a small matter of $820.00.  However, the Dalenberg Library has invested in two very fine Folio Society facsimiles of William Morris, and each of them cost about that much or more.  These books are works of art in their own right and are certainly in the “Top 10” of collectible books that we own.   

A few years ago, Folio Society put out a limited edition of The Kelmscott Chaucer, which was Morris’s  luxurious large format hardbound edition of the works of Chaucer, featuring his unique calligraphy & text illuminations, with enhancements contributed by his close friend, Victorian artist Edward Burne-Jones.  Morris had made his name as a founder of the Arts & Crafts movement, which much like in his fantasy stories, looked back to an idealized medieval period when artisans and craftsmen worked together to create things of value.  This was the antithesis to the mass production, grease, and grime of the industrial revolution that Morris disliked.  In the last decade of his life, after mastering many artistic techniques through diligent study, Morris turned to producing print runs of artistic books with meticulous calligraphy and illuminations through his Kelmscott Press. The Press did not much outlive him, however, because these books were, by nature, expensive to produce and could only be afforded by the very rich.  But in over 50 volumes, Morris produced the finest editions ever released in the Victorian era, utilizing self-designed typefaces, handmade paper, and printing by hand. Other than the 17th Century Dutch family Bible, the Folio facsimile of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the production of which occupied much of the last 6 years of William Morris’s life, is the largest, most beautiful book in the Dalenberg Library.   

Aside from not being a scientist, and from being more interested in the Middle Ages than the Renaissance, William Morris was the closest thing in the 19th Century to a Renaissance man.  He was famous as a designer of textiles, tapestries, and wallpapers, as well as being a poet, novelist, translator (of Icelandic sagas), and socialist political activist.  He is one of the most distinctive and influential artists of repeating decorative designs.  Many of his designs are still available commercially today, with their repeating, interlocking floral motifs.  Morris & Company, with sales of textiles, wallpapers, stained glass and other interior decorating needs, made William Morris famous and rich in his lifetime.   And perhaps it was not quite correct to say that he was not a scientist, because much of Morris’s contribution came from improving techniques of production.  He was intimately involved in the technical aspect of his products, down to fine details, such as favoring organic dyes over chemical dyes for the textiles.

Prior to The Kelmscott Press, when Morris started creating fine books in press runs for general purchase, he had toyed with the illumination of texts on a hobby basis.  In the 1870’s, he illuminated 18 books, harking back to the style of illuminated medieval manuscripts.  The latest Folio Society special edition, put out this year, is a facsimile of a volume now in the Bodleian Library, William Morris’s illuminated text of the Odes of the Roman poet Horace, in Latin.  The Folio edition is a wonder to behold, bound in goatskin on fine paper, and looking for all the world like the hand-produced work of the artist himself, down to the gold leaf used in the illuminations.  The book is stored in a special presentation box and is accompanied by a separate volume with an essay on Morris’s production of the book and a translation of the Odes into English.  The Odes of Horace was probably illuminated as a gift for a friend, possibly the wife of artist Burne-Jones.  It is actually only three-quarters complete, but the last portion of the book is still charming, as it has many of the outlines that were later to have been turned into the completed illuminations, which gives it the quality of an artist’s work-in-progress.  

The Odes of Horace is a beautiful volume, with a rich leather aroma, and each page is eye candy for a book-lover.  After handling it and studying it, I now covet Morris’s storied illuminated edition of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”, and I wonder if the Folio Society will attempt that one and whether I’ll have the $900 or so that it will inevitably cost.  

I have chosen here to display the page featuring Horace’s most famous quote, “Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero,” which can be translated as “Seize the day, for you cannot trust what tomorrow might bring.” My Latin is almost non-existent, so don’t completely quote me on the rest of the line, but I can vouch for the fact that “seize the day” is the most often quoted translation of “carpe diem.”   Horace is a more personal writer of odes than his Greek predecessors, such as Pindar, who were writing poems in praise of the gods and for various ceremonial occasions.  Another of my favorites is Horace’s  faintly ribald ode to Lydia, who is growing old enough that the young men are no longer calling, and yet she still lusts despite her years.  The calligraphy, the emboldened capital letters, and the extreme ornamentation of the initial letter of each poem is vintage William Morris.  

Robin Williams: 1951-2014

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

August 12, 2014

This has been a sad week for the movies as we lost iconic performers Robin Williams to suicide (at age 63) and Lauren Bacall to an apparent stroke (at age 89). 

Williams’ death by suicide hits hardest.  If any movie actor of our era could fairly be described as “beloved,” it would have to be Robin Williams.  His mission was to make people happy.  He even made a movie about making sick people happy, called Patch Adams.  If Robin Williams, of all people, could be unhappy, where does that leave the rest of us? How are we to go on?  Movies featuring Williams grossed 5.5 billion dollars worldwide (in non-inflation-adjusted dollars).  That’s a lot of money.  Can’t money buy happiness?  Doesn’t comedy equate with happiness?  Williams’ death is unsettling.  He worked all his life keeping the rest of us from killing ourselves. Didn’t he?  

As a physician, and as somebody who has been depressed, I know a little about what happened to Williams.  His suicide scene was exactly the type of low altitude hanging that I learned about in medical school in the lecture where the county medical examiner showed just how little altitude was required to hang yourself with a belt.  The M.E. had a series of slides where people had successfully hanged themselves sitting in chairs, hanging from doorknobs, in their own bedroom closets.  They were followed by a series of slides showing just how little water was required to drown yourself.  Williams’ death was just like twenty or thirty slides that I watched in my medical school lecture.  It takes me back.  I’ve seen this death before.  

Unlike Robin Williams, I have never struggled with cocaine or alcohol abuse (or with massive fame, for that matter.)  But I have been clinically depressed for maybe 3 full years of my 53--two years around one divorce, and about one year around a second divorce.  Thankfully, my  depression has therefore only consumed 5.7% of my lifespan.  But it was enough to give me insight into the plight of people like Robin Williams.  When I was depressed the world was black and nothing could cheer me up.  I would walk down the street and hope for a car to jump the sidewalk and take me out.  It didn’t matter that there was so much to live for.  Robin Williams had a lot to live for.  He was worth 5.5 billion non-inflation-adjusted dollars to the film industry, and he had the adulation of millions.  In the final reckoning, it didn’t matter.  He reportedly didn’t even leave a suicide note.  He didn’t want notoriety for this, or to have the last word, or to get back at anybody—he just wanted it over with—he couldn’t stand the pain, the black outlook, the teetering on the abyss.  

This suicide should remind us that depression is a disease, and all too often a fatal disease. People do not always realize that.  Take, for instance, my second wife, who was a harsh woman who rejected the notion of depression.  She felt like depression was a state of mind that you could snap into or out of at will, as if it were just a way to get sympathy from those around you.  She had no tolerance for me or any of her children making claims of depression.  She exemplified the kind of ignorance that overlooks serious disease until it is too late.  Depression leading to suicide is a biochemical state over which one has little control, whether or not it also has situational stressors associated with it.  With all respect to Robin Williams’ mourning family, I have no idea whether they suspected he was at risk or not.  But this death should be a reminder to us all to take this disease seriously, to watch out for it in our loved ones, and to sound the alarm when necessary.  

A lot will be written about Williams in the coming weeks and months.  Some of it will seem disrespectful.  The saturation media coverage will become nauseating.  We are already starting to hear that he had money problems, that his two divorces had gutted his bank accounts, that he was depressed over the cancellation of his latest TV series, that to make ends meet he had been forced to get involved in a sequel (though he disliked the idea of sequels) to his hit film  Mrs. Doubtfire.  

Instead of the tabloid angles, let’s remember the performer and how he made us laugh and generally just feel good.  I personally enjoyed Williams at his edgiest, when he was being a stand-up comic, or when he was rattling on hilariously as Mork from Ork, or when he was doing frenetic voice-overs for films like Aladdin (as the Genie) and A.I. (as Dr. Know).  Perhaps my favorite Robin Williams moment ever was in an uncredited role, as the King of the Moon in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), the scene where his head kept becoming detached from his body.  I liked him less well as his career wore on, and you knew when you saw Robin Williams in the cast, that something about the film was going to be a little too precious and cutesie and over-sentimental.  I really didn’t care to see him in dramatic cameos, like when he showed up as Dwight D. Eisenhower in The Butler.  I kept expecting him to deliver a clever one-liner and get a rim-shot.  

As I look back, I have spent a lot of enjoyable hours in the past 35 years watching Robin Williams’ performances.  Aside from various stand-up comedy, TV, and awards show appearances, I can come up with 17 performances on my personal lifetime Robin Williams list.  My best homage is to recount them here, followed by a moment of silence.   

1978-1982    Mork & Mindy (TV)

1980        Popeye (see pic above with co-star Shelley Duvall)

1982    The World According to Garp (still Williams’ best film, in my humble opinion)

1987    Good Morning, Vietnam

1988    The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

1989    Dead Poets Society

1990     Awakenings

1991    Hook

1992    FernGully: The Last Rainforest (voice-over)

1992    Aladdin (voice-over)

1993    Mrs. Doubtfire

1996     The Birdcage

1997    Good Will Hunting

1998    What Dreams May Come

1999    Bicentennial Man

2001    A.I. (voice-over)

2013    The Butler

. . . .God rest Robin Williams. 

Bow-Tied and Brilliant: My Memories of Leonard Peltier, MD, PhD (1920-2003)

Portrait from Asclepiad 1987 (University of Arizona College

of Medicine yearbook).  

By Dale D. Dalenberg MD

June 17, 2014

​There have been four great mentors in my professional life. They are:  Leonard Peltier MD PhD, Marc Asher MD, Edward H. Simmons MD, and William H. Pickett JD.  As a group I owe them my career in orthopedics, any modicum of respect and credibility I have as a practicing physician and as a medico-legal consultant, and the inspiration to be what pale shadow of a Renaissance man that I can hope to be.  Today, I exist professionally on the crossroads between the arts & the humanities, clinical medicine, and that zone of overlap between medicine and the law.  Without the inspiration of these four great men, I would never have had the notion to try to combine all that in one life.  

I owe a great debt to Dr. Peltier, who is quite simply the main reason that I am an orthopedic surgeon today.  I met him when I was a third-year medical student (1985-86) at the University of Arizona doing a rotation in orthopedic surgery at the Tucson VA Medical Center.  Peltier was at that time the elder faculty member in orthopaedics at Arizona, having recently stepped down from the chairmanship of orthopaedics and handed that job to his former resident Bob Volz.  He was shortly to be saddled with the designation of Acting Head of Surgery, which is a job I don’t think he sought out but which was thrust upon him.  In that brief window of time when he wasn’t head of anything, he found time for teaching students, and part of that was weekly teaching rounds at the VA.  I remember that a commotion ran through the orthopedic ranks of residents and students as the hour approached for Peltier’s visit.  It was as if a visiting dignitary were coming.  We were admonished to be on our best behavior, to pay rapt attention, and to speak only when spoken to.  I was immediately enthralled by him.  He was erudite, impeccably bow-tied, and seemed like one of the medical gods that I had worshipped in all my reading about famous doctors up to the time I entered medical school, which included names like Jenner and Lister and Pasteur.  It’s actually a good thing I’d done all that reading, because that’s how Dr. Peltier got to know me, how I stood out of the crowd to him, and why he wrote me that all-important letter of recommendation to the program (University of Kansas) that enrolled me as an orthopedic surgery resident.  

My medical school classmates clearly got the message that I was an immediate convert to the Leonard Peltier, MD, PhD, fan club.  I was definitely a Peltier follower after those VA rounds.  In my medical school year-book, Asclepiad (1987), my classmates wrote the following caption under my senior portrait:  “A disciple of the Leonard Peltier school of charm, Dale would give anything to inherit Dr. Peltier’s bow tie collection.  His serious demeanor suggested to many ill-fitting underwear, when in fact he long suffered from an overdose of Ingmar Bergman films.  Having fathered a son, and thus rediscovered the Wonderful World of Disney, a full recovery is expected prior to beginning Ortho at Kansas.”  My classmates were perceptive about my attachment to Peltier, my study of the arts along with medicine, and they predicted the day when I would be co-authoring this arts blog with that same son referenced in the yearbook, Alexander David Dalenberg.  Due to my middle-aged spread, the underwear is still ill-fitting, but I am much less serious these days than the yearbook entry would suggest.  

Anyway, about Dr. Peltier, and how he noticed me enough to recommend me for a residency:

Peltier’s Big Thing was the history of medicine. Granted, he wrote a lot of original scientific papers, some 200 of them, most notably about fat embolism syndrome, but his great passion was history.  

When we students were all standing at the scrub sinks washing our hands (at his behest) before entering a VA ward, he asked the group why we were doing what we were doing (namely, handwashing.)  After an unpleasant silence by the group at large, I could not contain myself any longer, so I blurted out the answer:  Ignaz Semmelweiss.  And I proceeded to relate the story about how Semmelweiss, without knowing anything in those days (circa 1847) about bacteria or infectious organisms, figured out by sheer epidemiological reasoning that women on the obstetrics ward at his Vienna hospital were dying from exposure to “cadaver particles”  that were being taken to the maternity ward by the medical trainees doing autopsies, whereas the women on the midwives’ ward were only rarely getting “childbed fever” because the midwives’ didn’t go to the morgue to do autopsies.  Semmelweis also noticed that women who gave birth in the street also rarely died.  Semmelweiss instituted a policy of handwashing and slashed the death rate (unfortunately, the medical establishment didn’t believe his research, and Semmelweiss spent the rest of his life railing against the ignoramuses and murderers who were allowing the women to die for want of proper handwashing; Semmelweiss died in an insane asylum and his research wasn’t resurrected until decades later after Pasteur and Lister had popularized the “germ theory” of infectious disease).  

When I related this story on the orthopedic ward at the VA, Dr. Peltier was silently impressed.  Peltier was rather lofty from the students’ perspective and seemed very un-approachable, so his silence was widely mis-interpreted.  I remember that Bradley Brainard (a resident at the time) assumed Peltier’s intent had been to stump us all, and he whispered in my ear that Peltier was pissed off that I knew the answer.  However, the fact is that Dr. Peltier never forgot who I was after that.  When I asked him later for a recommendation letter for my orthopedic residency applications, he was eager to help.  Thus Dr. Peltier kick-started my orthopedic education and career, and I am forever grateful to him for that.  I used to hesitate to say hello to him at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meetings, where I would run into him even after he was fully retired and Dr. Volz had started replacing his joints.  I always thought he would have forgotten who I was, but he always remembered.

The thing I loved most about Peltier was his Renaissance quality.  He was never focused on the picky little details of orthopedic surgery, but rather he conveyed a sense of the over-arching place of modern orthopedics as it existed in the context of historical medicine.  And on the clinical side of things, he propagated the message that orthopedics did not exist in a vacuum, but that the orthopedic problems of a patient existed in the context of a greater world of general surgery and an even greater world of the whole organism.  Peltier was one of those giants who used to populate the orthopedic world, but have since become a vanished breed, who were  trained as general surgeons and only later specialized as orthopedists.  I loved going to the orthopedic radiology conference with Peltier presiding.  A typical Peltier tactic was to get an unsuspecting student in front of the crowd and show him a pelvis radiograph and ask, “What systemic disease does this patient have?”  You were supposed to scrutinize the radiograph and notice the vascular clips in the lower corner of the film from saphenous vein harvest for coronary artery bypass, and you were supposed to say something like “atherosclerosis” or “coronary artery disease.” Peltier didn’t want to hear about the pelvis—he wanted you to glean from the pelvis radiograph something more general and more important about the whole patient.  

About the time I was finishing my orthopedic surgery residency, Peltier came out with his two fine, illustrated books, one on the history of fractures, and the other one on the history of orthopedics.  I couldn’t afford them at the time, but I have since made up for that with the financially successful career that Dr. Peltier made possible for me.  A small corner of the Dalenberg Library today is devoted to historically important medical books, and Peltier’s two volumes (that I have since acquired) are a fine addition to the Library, right alongside the books Peltier himself would have wanted me to read--like Mercer Rang’s pediatric fracture book and Henry’s Extensile Exposure, to name just a couple from Dr. Peltier’s era.  

A couple of things impress me as I read back through Fractures: A History and Iconography of Their Treatment (1990) and Orthopedics: A History and Iconography (1993).   Nowadays, the orthopedic literature is preoccupied with economics.  We read about the economic impact of total knee arthroplasty and lumbar discectomy.  We read about the lack of efficacy of non-operative spine care and spine surgery as related to the public policy burden of paying for it.  But historically, the quest was more directed at defining disease and the solutions to disease.  One senses that expensive, but not always efficacious, technologies (and—perhaps--expensive doctors commanding six-, bordering on seven-, figure incomes) have changed the dialogue and buried good science. In Dr. Peltier’s books, we can experience a refreshing return to a more innocent time when there were problems to be solved, like tuberculosis of the bones and joints, like infantile paralysis.  The other thing that impresses me about Dr. Peltier’s books is the vast expanse of orthopedics that existed BEFORE arthroscopy and arthroplasty.  These days, entire careers are spent doing only arthroscopy or only arthroplasty (in many sub-specialty practices), but those two disciplines merit barely a chapter out of the two books, and only the infancy of each are touched upon.  It is humbling to realize what a vast and varied field is orthopedics, and how little of it any one of us modern orthopedists really has a grasp upon.   

A 19th Century Fascination: Doomed Lovers from the 13th Century

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

April 30, 2014

Francesca and Paolo on the hell-wind, frontispiece to The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, volume I, The Davos Press (New York), 1909.  In The Dalenberg Library of Antique Popular Literature.  

This illustration, from the Longfellow translation, is similar to the Doré that inspired Tchaikovsky.  While we love Longfellow at the Dalenberg Library, his version of The Divine Comedy is not his best-remembered production.  It seems to suffer from a slavish devotion to transliterating the Italian lines into English, producing many examples of inverted syntax, often to the point where you cannot follow the story.  To be sure, there is some charming 19th Century language (such as when Longfellow characterizes the sinners of passion on Dante’s second level of Hell as “carnal malefactors”).  Longfellow botches the most memorable quote in Dante’s scene, where Francesca says “. . .There is no greater sorrow/Than to be mindful of the happy time/In misery. . . .” The same line is rendered much more poetically by Dorothy Sayers in her 1949 translation: “. . .The bitterest of woes/Is to remember in our wretchedness/Old happy times. . . .”

Freshly immersed in the theatricality of Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas--having attended the first full production of the Ring cycle in Bayreuth, Germany--Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) briefly considered writing an opera on the theme of the doomed lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, based on the famous episode in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno.  Balking at doing it as an opera, he settled instead for turning the subject matter into his 1876 symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini.  Perhaps not as well known today as other early Tchaikovsky orchestral masterpieces, such as the Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, Francesca da Rimini is a remarkable piece that has everything in it that people love about Tchaikovsky, sumptuous orchestration and the kind of expansive, gorgeous love theme melody that keeps Tchaikovsky on the greatest hits list.  

Tchaikovsky casts Dante’s Francesca da Rimini episode as a kind of frame story in music.  First, he depicts the gates of Hell that the shades of Dante and his guide, the Roman poet Virgil, must pass through.  Then, he depicts the swirling whirlwind that has trapped the doomed lovers, sentenced to be buffeted about for an eternity in Hell by the storms of their passion.  Then, portrayed by a solo clarinet, Francesca steps out of the whirlwind to tell the story of her passionate love affair with Paolo, the younger brother of her hideously deformed husband, and of how they were murdered together by her husband’s hand and condemned to an eternity in the Inferno due to their illicit passion.  The music swells from solo clarinet to full orchestral grandeur as the story is told, and then Tchaikovsky deconstructs the melody and the music morphs back into the roiling tune of the hell-wind.  

One does not usually think of Wagner and Tchaikovsky in the same sentence, but the hell-wind music of Francesca da Rimini is Tchaikovsky’s one true Wagnerian moment, and it is equally as effective as the grand love theme.  Interestingly, Tchaikovsky had his doubts at first.  Tchaikovsky was as much inspired by Gustave Doré’s illustration of the doomed lovers as he was by the Dante text.  He wrote to his brother Modest upon completing the draft for the symphonic poem, “As for the whirlwind, something might have been written to better correspond to Doré’s illustration, but it did not turn out as I had wished.  However, a true judgment on this piece is unthinkable until it has been orchestrated and performed.”  Listening to the piece today, it appears that Tchaikovsky was selling himself a bit short.  Final judgment is quite favorable.  

Apparently, Tchaikovsky was momentarily obsessed with the Francesca da Rimini story to the point where he had to get it out of his system by writing something based on it.  It is easy to think that brief obsession was fuelled by Tchaikovsky’s constant preoccupation with the doom inherent in his own love life, given the internal conflicts over his sexual orientation (about which he vacillated from a point of comfort to the guilt of characterizing it as a “vice.”) All discussion about Tchaikovsky these days is consumed with his closeted homosexuality.  It is easy to think that his fascination with this tale of doomed lovers has something to do with the maelstrom that constantly raged inside him about his comfort or discomfort (depending on the moment) with his sexual orientation, and the struggle in those days with public vs. private appearance.  I used to think that Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was some kind of myth that was created by modern gays to show how many famous people used to be gay.  But, in reality, the more you read, it appears that Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was most likely a major part of his personal identity and informed a lot of the events and struggles in his biography.  A very good book on the topic, and the one to which I owe the above quote in the letter to Modest, is Alexander Poznansky’s 1991 book Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man. 

Aside from the question of whether one man’s fascination with this tale of doomed lovers related to internal struggles over his sexuality, it appears that this tragic tale held sway over lots of people in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.  An Internet search uncovers no fewer than 17 different operas based on Francesca da Rimini, as well as numerous stage plays.  The average art museum-goer may not know this, but Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture The Kiss is actually a depiction of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta locked in an embrace, their lips not exactly touching, as if they are poised on the very moment of their first transgression or possibly about to be interrupted before consummating their love.  The Kiss was originally planned for that other Rodin masterpiece The Gates of Hell, but the artist removed the Francesca da Rimini figurine from the finished sculpture and expanded it into its own piece.  

The source material for this tale of doomed lovers is based on actual history, enshrined by Dante Alighieri in Canto V of the Inferno, from The Divine Comedy.  The events were contemporaneous with Dante’s life and well known to him because he lived in the area.  Rimini is on the eastern Italian coast in the same province as Ravenna, where Dante died after having been exiled from his native Florence.  Francesca was the daughter of Guido da Polenta of Ravenna, who had been at war with Giovanni Malatesta of Rimini (Italian city-states were given to bickering in those days long before the unification of Italy.)  At age 20, Francesca was given to Giovanni, who was known for being crippled or deformed, in an arranged marriage as part of a truce between the warring families and their city-states.  It so happens that Giovanni had a younger brother, Paolo, who was more handsome, hearty, and hale.  Francesca and Paolo embarked on a 10-year affair under the nose of Giovanni, until about 1285, when Francesca was 30 years old. The lovers were discovered together in Francesca’s bedroom, and Giovanni murdered both of them by his own hand.  Apparently, there were no earthly repercussions to Giovanni, other than the local fame of the episode, because he lived until 1294, and went on in his warrior capacity to capture a local city, Pesaro, and rule it until his death.  

In The Divine Comedy, Dante (c. 1265-1321) put Francesca and Paolo in the second circle of Hell, buffeted about eternally by winds that are intended to mirror the passions to which they sacrificed their reason.  Their eternal damnation may seem unfair from a modern perspective, because a modern point of view would likely give Francesca a pass for being mere chattel in a political truce.  But to be fair to Dante, he does get modern credit for condemning Giovanni to the lowest circle of Hell for offing his brother.  Apparently, it was ok to Dante that he killed his unfaithful wife, but the real shame was that he committed fratricide.  

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), in his book on Dante, adds the element to the story that Francesca had been tricked into marriage with the crippled older brother, thinking it was the younger brother who was her suitor up until the moment at the altar.  Dante does not mention any such twist in Inferno and nobody before Boccaccio mentions it, and historians think it highly unlikely that it really happened that way.  But many of the 19th Century versions of the story include that plot element, which serves to make the story even more tragic, as Francesca gets tricked into marrying the cripple, gets seduced by the younger brother, gets murdered by her husband, then ends up in Hell for eternity. 

While Tchaikovsky did not make Francesca da Rimini into an opera, his greatest spiritual successor, Sergei Rachmaninoff, did produce such an opera, which premiered in 1906.  Modest Tchaikovsky had encouraged his brother Peter to write the symphonic poem;  but he went one step beyond encouragement for Rachmaninoff and actually wrote the libretto for the opera.  The opera is a one-act, with an intro, two scenes, and an epilogue, that takes about an hour to perform.  Modest’s libretto sticks to Dante almost word-for-word in the frame story, but in the two scenes that are flashbacks to the events that occurred during life before the damnation to Hell, he takes full poetic license and heaps on the 19th Century trappings of the story.  While it is not a masterpiece, there is a lot to recommend Rachmaninoff’s short opera.  The structure is closely modelled on Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem, with a few special touches.  The whirlwind music in the Rachmaninoff is full of groans, howls, and cries of despair (provided by a choir).  The two central scenes provide a stark contrast to each other.  The first is a duet between Francesca and her husband.  The second is a duet between Paolo and Francesca, interrupted of course, by the murder.  In the first scene, Giovanni (called Lanceotto Malatesta in this version) regrets having tricked his wife into their marriage, since he knows that she does not love him. In their duet, she professes her devotion as a wife, but he begs for her love instead of just her submission.  In a stinging moment, she states that she cannot lie about being in love with him.  In the second scene, Francesca and Paolo fall in love while reading about Lancelot and Guinevere (which is straight out of the Dante version.)  In this version, typical of the 19th Century versions, Francesca rebuffs Paolo at first, objecting that she is another man’s wife, but in the course of the scene, he seduces her.  Also, typical of the Romantic Era, the 13th Century events of 10 years are compressed into a single moment, as the lovers are discovered and murdered either before or in the act of consummating their love for the first time.  Rachmaninoff’s love duet in the second scene is the centerpiece of his short opera, and it is the highlight, climaxing with the murder.

While Francesca da Rimini is no longer material for frequent adaptations, the story seems to stick around.  In 2013, the Metropolitan Opera revived Riccardo Zandonai’s 1914 opera version, which has never gone out of the repertory in Italy.  Interestingly, Zandonai (1883-1944) was director of the conservatory and spent the final years of his life in a town affiliated with this story, Giovanni Malatesta’s own Pesaro.