Music to my "Snow Maiden" amazing, I could not ever imagine a more suitable to her and so vividly expresses the poetry of Russian pagan cult, and this first snow and the cold, and then irresistibly passionate main character of the tale.
Alexander Ostrovsky
The Snow Maiden is an opera in four acts with a prologue by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, composed during 1880–1881. The Russian libretto, by the composer, is based on the like-named play by Alexander Ostrovsky (which had premiered in 1873 with incidental music by Tchaikovsky).
The first performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera took place at the Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg on 29 January 1882 (OS; 10 February NS) conducted by Eduard Nápravník. By 1898 it was revised in the edition known today. It remained the composer's own favorite work.
The story deals with the opposition of eternal forces of nature and involves the interactions of mythological characters (Frost, Spring, Wood-Sprite), real people (Kupava, Mizgir'), and those in-between, i.e., half-mythical, half-real (Snow Maiden, Lel’, Berendey). The composer strove to distinguish each group of characters musically, and several individual characters have their own associated leitmotifs. In addition to these distinctions, Rimsky-Korsakov characterized the townspeople particularly with folk melodies. For a deeper understanding of this work from the composer's point of view, the reader is directed to his autobiography, as well as to his own incomplete analysis of the opera from 1905.
The Moscow premiere followed that of St. Petersburg three years later in 1885. It was presented by the Russian Private Opera (the Opera of Savva Mamontov in Moscow), conducted by Enrico Bevignani with scenic Design by Viktor Vasnetsov, Isaak Levitan, and Konstantin Korovin; Tsar Berendey – Grigoriy Erchov, Bermyata – Anton Bedlevitch, Spring Beauty – Vera Gnucheva, Grandfather Frost – Stepan Vlasov, The Snow Maiden – Nadejda Salina, Bobyl Bakula – G. Kassilov or Nikolay Miller, Lel – Tatyana Liubatovitch, Mizgir – Mikhail Malinin (Boris Mikhailovich Malinin and Marina Raskova’s father), Second Herald – M.Skuratovskiy.
The Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow presented the opera in 1893.
In March 2014 University College Opera presented a new English translation of The Snowmaiden in the Bloomsbury Theatre.
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