FULL The Stone Guest (Dargomyzhsky) Kharkiv 2004

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: The Stone Guest - Kamennyj gost'  
• Composer: Dargomyzhsky Alexander  
• Libretto: Alexander Pushkin    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Opera Studio at the I.P. Kotlyarevsky Kharkiv National University of Arts, Kharkiv, Ukraine  
• Recorded: January 20, 2004
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: unknown
• Conductor: unknown  
• Orchestra:
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: videokhnum  
• Date Published: 2015  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
• Subtitles: nosubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  The Stone Guest (Каменный гость in Cyrillic, Kamennyj gost’ in transliteration) is an opera in three acts by Alexander Dargomyzhsky from a libretto taken almost verbatim from Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 play of the same name which had been written in blank verse and which forms part of his collection Little Tragedies.

  It was first performed at the Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg, 16 February 1872 (Old Style).

  According to the composer’s wishes, the last few lines of tableau 1 were composed by César Cui, and the whole was orchestrated by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Many years later, Rimsky-Korsakov revised his own orchestration of the opera, rewrote a few of Dargomyzhsky’s own original passages, and added an orchestral prelude. This version, completed in 1903 and first performed in 1907 at the Bolshoi Theatre, is now considered the standard version.

  Style

  As an opera, The Stone Guest is notable for having its text taken almost word-for-word from the literary stage work which inspired it, rather than being set to a libretto adapted from the source in order to accommodate opera audiences which would have expected to hear arias, duets, and choruses. Consequently, the resulting musical drama consists almost entirely of solos given in turn by each character, as in a spoken play.

  This procedure amounted to a radical statement about the demands of spoken and musical drama and was seen by some as a devaluation of the musical genre of opera, and distinct from the literary genre of spoken drama. Tchaikovsky in particular was critical of the idea; in response to Dargomyzhky’s statement that “I want sound directly to express the word. I want truth”, he wrote in his private correspondence that nothing could be so “hateful and false” as the attempt to present as musical drama something that was not.

  Quoted from Wikipedia

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