Overture to the opera „Ruslan and Lyudmila”

Five years later emerged his second opera – „RUSLAN AND LYUDMILA”, which effectively initiated a long series of fairy-tale operas in Russian music. It was based on the eponymous early narrative poem of Alexander Pushkin and in 1837, when the project was first conceived, the composer hoped the poet would collaborate personally in drafting the outline for the work. But Pushkin’s unexpected demise compelled Glinka to look for other librettists and in reality much of the plot and the personages in the poem underwent significant changes. The premiere of the opera took place on 9 December 1842 on the stage of St. Petersburg’s Bolshoi Theatre, but it was not a success. The critical reviews had a painful effect on Glinka, since they coincided with his personal drama – the separation with Ekaterina Kern, the daughter of the famous Anna Kern, who was Pushkin’s inspiration for his illustrious poem Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnovenie (“I keep in mind that magic moment”) (On these verses Glinka wrote his eponymous romance, dedicated to Anna Kern.) „Ruslan and Lyudmila” does not rank among the particularly popular works for the stage, but its Overture stands out as an individual piece among the most vibrant and most frequently performed opuses in Russian classical orchestral music. It fascinates with the vitality of the original theme and the melodic beauty of Ruslan’s love theme that follows after it. And the concluding theme – a descending anhemitonic gamut – “the scale of Chernomor the evil sorcerer” – is a genuine compositional discovery, which made a tradition in the representation of evil fantastic characters in Russian opera music.