11 - Pushkin in music

Summary

Among modern poets set to music, Pushkin occupies an unparalleled position. According to the Russian scholar Valerii Kikta, in opera alone there are no fewer than 141 works based on Pushkin’s oeuvre, including one rock opera (Tsar, Saltan by V. Sokolov, 1980) and excluding works that take Pushkin as their subject. The Gypsies, for instance, has inspired no fewer than eighteen operas - among them, Rakhmaninov’s Aleko (1893), Tsygany by Rimskii- Korsakov’s disciple V. Kalafati (1941), Gli zingari by Ruggerio Leoncavallo (1912) and Zigäunen (1883) by Walter von Goethe (the poet’s grandson) - plus a half a dozen ballets. The first of over sixty Pushkinian pieces for the musical theatre, the ballet Ruslan and Ludmila, or the Overthrow of Chernomor, the Evil Sorcerer by Friedrich ('Fedor Efimovich') Scholz, appeared in 1821 just as Pushkin achieved his first success. The early Soviet period celebrated the centennial of his death with the opera Pushkin’s Death (Gibel' Pushkina) by G. Kreitner (1937), while in the post-Soviet period Pushkin has already inspired The Captain’s Daughter, a ballet produced in 1998 by the former 'chairman' of Soviet music, the octogenarian Tikhon Khrennikov, and the ballet Alexander and Natalie (Aleksandr i Natali, 1990) by V. A. Pikul', a product of more frivolous times. A host of cantatas, programmatic symphonic and chamber compositions, and numerous pieces of incidental music for films and stage productions, also form part of this musical corpus. The collective output of about 500 authors of 'romances' (art songs) and choruses based on Pushkin’s lyrical poetry numbers in the range of several thousand pieces.