There are not so many operas written for children - the genre itself, with all the conventions and traditions, does not seem to imply an audience consisting of fidgets. Petersburg composer Sergei Banevich, who chose children's music as his path, tried to overcome this injustice. "The Story of Kai and Gerda", his most famous work, is an opera for children, written according to all the rules of an adult musical drama.
The plot was borrowed from Andersen - his "Snow Queen" was translated into the language of opera libretto by the poet Tatyana Kalinina. The action needed to be made lapidary, the episodes were spectacular, and the idea was comprehensible to the public 6+. The events of the "History" are interspersed with the sermon of the wise Lamplighter, dance interludes and the symphonic picture "Flight on the Reindeer" are successfully inscribed in the score. The vocal lines of the characters are designed for adult performers, and the language of the opera, based on ariose utterance, is accessible to children's perception. In the finale, the authors bring two female images face to face: love and death are fighting in the fight for a person’s heart, Gerda and the Snow Queen – paradoxically, a musical parable written in the late 1970s appeals to the Christian motifs of Andersen’s fairy tale, which was not published in those years. reproduced (in a fairy tale, God and the devil fight for Kai's soul).
“This opera is equally addressed to both children and adults, it is about losing and finding oneself, as in educational novels. Thinking about Kai, I also think about those today's teenagers with fragments of the “mirror of evil” in their hearts, who do not know what love is, do not know the price of life, who are ruthless and merciless,” the composer reflects.
The name "The Story of Kai and Gerda" first appeared on the playbill of the Kirov Theater in 1980; it lasted a decade in the repertoire, withstanding more than a hundred performances. Later, the production of Yuri Alexandrov was resumed, and young Anna Netrebko, Leonid Zakhozhaev, Evgeny Nikitin sang in the performance. On Netrebko's initiative, the Viennese version of the opera with a German libretto (Die Schneekönigin) was performed for two summer seasons on the stage of the Haydn Hall in the castle of the Esterhazy princes near Vienna. The opera has a happy stage fate in Russia: it was staged in Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Perm, Minsk, Kyiv, Vladikavkaz, Pskov. Now "History" is in the Bolshoi and Novosibirsk theaters. The current Mariinsky production was entrusted to experienced masters of fairy tales - director Alexei Stepanyuk and artist Elena Orlova.