Organization

Conductor

Alexander Anisimov

Stage director

Mikhail Pandzhavidze

Set designer

Costume designer

Lighting designer

Chorus master

Olga Safronova

Choreographer

Gali Abaidulov

Video designer

Pavel Suvorov

Libretto

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Samara Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet

Russian

Snegurotchka -  (The Snowmaiden)

Samara

Russia

Snegurotchka Rimsky-Korsakov

Public

The Snowmaiden

Approved

"The Snow Maiden" by N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov. Promo. SATOB

The Snow Maiden is Rimsky-Korsakov's most poetic opera. The composer considered it his best creation. The Snow Maiden impresses with its surprisingly sensitive, loving reproduction of pictures of folk life, rituals of ancient paganism, wonderful images of folk tales. The music of the opera, imbued with unfading freshness and wise simplicity of folk songs, is colored with soft lyrics, spring tones of blossoming nature. “This is exactly a spring fairy tale - with all the beauty, poetry of spring, all the warmth, all the fragrance,” Alexander Borodin wrote about the opera.

Alexander Ostrovsky also enthusiastically received the opera: “The music for my “Snow Maiden” is amazing, I could never imagine anything more suitable for it and so vividly expressing all the poetry of the Russian pagan cult and this first snow-cold, and then irrepressibly passionate heroine of a fairy tale” .
The composer later said that not a single work was given to him with such ease and speed as The Snow Maiden. He highly appreciated its significance in his own work, in particular saying: “When I finished The Snow Maiden, I felt like a matured musician and opera composer, who finally got on his feet.” When composing the opera, Rimsky-Korsakov paid special attention to vocal style - comfortable tessitura, flexibility and showiness of vocal parts, freedom of smoothly flowing recitative.

The optimistic idea of ​​the opera - the glorification of the powerful life-giving forces of nature, bringing happiness to people - is rooted in folk poetry. The Snow Maiden at the same time embodies the idea of ​​the great transforming power of art. The opera contrasts two worlds - the real and the fantastic, personifying, according to the composer, "the eternal, periodically appearing forces of nature."
The Snow Maiden, the shepherd Lel and Tsar Berendey are semi-real, semi-fantastic characters. Yarila-sun - "the creative principle that causes life in nature and people" (Rimsky-Korsakov) - is hostile to severe Frost. The Snow Maiden, a cold child of Frost and Spring, reaches out with her whole soul to people, to the sun, and the composer, with a wonderful truth of expression, shows how gradually love and warmth triumph in her heart, leading to death.

The Snow Maiden appeared in the repertoire of our theater already in the very first season of its existence - 1931/32. Later, The Snow Maiden was staged back in 1933 (director Alexander Varlamov), 1935 and 1943 (director of both productions - Ivan Prostorov). The current production of 2015 is the fifth in the history of SATOB. And the performance that preceded it in 1983 was produced by the legendary leaders of the theater - director Alexander Tumilovich and conductor Lev Ossovsky, who later became the musical director of the Boris Pokrovsky Theater in Moscow; with them in the team were the ballet masters of the Bolshoi Theater of Russia Yulamey Scott and Yuri Papko.

English

The Snowmaiden by Rimsky-Korsakov, From (2022/2022), Directed by Mikhail Pandzhavidze,, Conductor Alexander Anisimov, Samara Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, Samara, Russia

Performance credits (Cast & Crew )

Crew

Program, About & Synopsis

Videos

Photos

Further reading

Performance Dates & Venues

Venues