Askold's Grave (opera)

Askold's Grave (also: Askold's Tomb, Russian: Аскольдова могила – Askol’dova mogila) is an opera in four acts by Alexey Verstovsky with a libretto by Mikhail Zagoskin. It was the most successful of Verstovsky's six operas, and its popularity even overshadowed Glinka’s two operas. It is a romantic opera with spoken dialogue, influenced by Weber's Der Freischütz, the latter having become popular in Russia after its first Russian performance in 1824. The role of Torop was created specifically for Alexander Bantyshev.

The directors of the Imperial Theatres paid 2,000 rubles to the composer for this opera. The opera was first staged at the Bolshoi in Moscow on 16 September 1835, a year before Glinka's A Life for the Tsar. The main female role, Nadezhda, was portrayed by the wife of the composer, Nadezhda Repina (1809–1897), the daughter of a serf musician. Among the other performers: Alexander Bantyshev as Torop, Nikolai Lavrov as Neizvestnyi (the Unknown Man), Pavel Schepin as Vseslav, Vasiliy Jivokini as Frelaf, Nicolay Nikiforov as Blum; choreographer of Russian dances: Ivan Lobanov. In St. Petersburg the opera was staged on August 27, 1841, with the famous bass Osip Petrov in the role of Neizvestnyi (the Unknown Man); Leon Leonov as Torop. It has been claimed that the music was polished up by Gioacchino Rossini, based on Verstovsky's ideas, for a fee that covered a gambling debt. Two piano transcriptions (without voice) were published — one made by K. Vilboa, another by a composer Alexander Gurilyov. A vocal score was produced by O. Dutsh and K. Yevgeniev (published in 1866). By the end of the 1860s the opera had received about 200 performances in St. Petersburg and 400 in Moscow. It was the first Russian opera performed in the United States (in 1869). For this staging some fragments of Glinka's music were added to the opera. After the composer's death another version of the score was made with the orchestration by K. Voyachek, with spoken dialogue replaced by primitive recitatives. Russian singer Feodor Chaliapin chose the role of Neizvestnyi (the Unknown Man) for his benefice on March 3, 1891, when he was 18. A 1914 performance in the Sergei Zimin’s theater in Moscow had a huge success. In the Soviet era the opera was forgotten for several decades, and was only revived near the end of the Second World War in 1944 at the Moscow Theatre of Operetta under the title Украденная невеста (Ukradennaya Nevesta – The Stolen Bride), however with not much success. It returned to the stage on November 28, 1959, with a revised version of the libretto by N. Biryukov and musical rearrangement by B. Dobrokhotov. It was given at the Kyiv State Opera Theatre, staged by V. Sklarenko and conducted by P. Grigorov.

In Askold's Grave, the musical characterization of such personages as Vseslav or his fiancée Nadezhda belong to the sphere of sentiment romance. The style of chorus writing is near to Russian folk music. The role of Varangian Frelaf is comic and forestalls the character of Farlaf in Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila. The part of Neizvestnyi (the Unknown Man) is written for the voice (bass) of a very wide range and often a high tessitura. It contains some virtuoso passages and incredibly big intervallic leaps, like the major tenth in the second bar of the following example:

2 CDs Alexey Nikolayevich Verstovsky: Askold's Tomb, opera – Label: Consonance – Distributor: Koch. Run time: 1 hour 58 minutes – DDD – 794081001529. Performers: Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra (Moscow Radio) with Tatiana Panfilova, Lidiya Kovaleva, Galina Simkina, Andrei Salnikov, Lev Kuznetsov, Yuri Markelov, Boris Bezhko, Igor Miroschnichenko, Vladislav Verestnikov, Raisa Kotova, Vladimir Kudryashov, conducted by Yuri Nikonenko

«Сюжет Аскольдовой могилы в сущности настолько хорош, что за него не грех было бы взяться и современному композитору и, кто знает не возьмусь ли я сам когда либо за него» (Николай Римский Корсаков) – “The subject of Askold’s Grave essentially is so good that it would not be a sin even for a contemporary composer to put a hand into it, and, who knows probably one day I will put my own hand into it.” (Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov)