September 27: Kashchey the Immortal by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

autumnal parable in one act by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov; libretto by the composer and his daughter Sofiya after a scenario by Yevgeny Maximovich Petrovsky; premiered Moscow 1902

Sources: Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, and The New Penguin Opera Guide, ed. Amanda Holden (2001, Penguin Group)

Cast:
Kashchey the Immortal -- Konstantin Pluzhnikov
The Princess of Unearthly Beauty -- Marina Shaguch
Kashcheyevna, daughter of Kashchey -- Larissa Diadkova
Prince Ivan Korolevich -- Alexander Gergalov
The Storm Knight -- Alexander Morozov

A seasonal allegory like his Snow Maiden or Christmas Eve, Rimsky-Korsakov’s 12th opera is loosely based on a group of Russian folktales concerning Kashchey (tenor), an evil sorcerer who keeps captive the Princess Unearthly-Beauty (Nenaglyadnaya krasa; soprano) until she is rescued by Prince Ivan (Ivan-Korolevich or Ivan-Tsarevich, the Russian ‘Prince Charming’; baritone), who has found the hiding place where Kashchey has secreted his death – here, in the tears of the sorcerer’s hard-hearted daughter Kashcheyevna (mezzo-soprano), tears that she finally sheds for love of the prince.

Petrovsky, a music journalist, submitted a libretto called Ivan-Korolevich to Rimsky-Korsakov in November 1900, but the composer (‘the compleat musical materialist’, as Petrovsky called him) found its symbolism obscure. In the summer of 1901, after perusing Wagner’s Siegfried, Rimsky’s head began filling up with novel harmonic ideas that seemed to demand outlet in an opera about evil magic, so with his daughter’s help he revised Petrovsky’s libretto to meet his own standards of clarity and plunged in. The resulting text was sufficiently far from the original Ivan-Korolevich that Petrovsky saw fit to publish his libretto independently (St Petersburg, 1903), with a preface inviting any composer ‘open to the possibility of creating a Russian symbolist opera’ to help himself to it (there seem to have been no takers). The first performance was conducted by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, with Nadeshda Zabela as the Princess and Mikhail Bocharov as Prince Ivan. Rimsky-Korsakov revised the opera in 1906.

In March 1905, amid the widespread civil disturbances following the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of political protesters, a performance of Kashchey the Immortal was organized by a group of St Petersburg Conservatory pupils under Glazunov’s direction as a tribute to Rimsky-Korsakov, who had recently been dismissed from his professorship for supporting a student strike. (Rimsky was the single political liberal among the great Russian composers – something, it would seem, rather closely bound up in what Petrovsky called his ‘materialism’.) It proved very easy to invest the opera’s rather hoary conceptual dualism (icy-evil-supernatural chromaticism versus sunny-human-benign diatonics) with a new and topical metaphorical import, and the performances turned into a major political demonstration that had to be quelled by the tsarist police. The opera thus gained a ‘revolutionary’ aura that sustained it, despite its ‘decadent’ harmonic idiom (and also, perhaps, beyond its intrinsic deserts), in the Soviet repertory throughout the Stalinist period.

by Richard Taruskin, from Grove Online