The Stone Guest (Dargomyzhsky)
| Alexander Dargomyzhsky |
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Operas
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The Stone Guest (Каменный гость in Cyrillic, Kamennyj gost' in transliteration) is an opera in three acts by Alexander Dargomyzhsky. The libretto was taken almost verbatim from Alexander Pushkin's like-named play in blank verse (part of his collection Little Tragedies), with slight changes in wording and the interpolation of two songs indicated in the play. 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.
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[edit] Style
As an opera, The Stone Guest is notable for having its text taken almost exactly from the literary stage work which inspired it, rather than relying on a libretto adapted from the source in order to accommodate expectations of opera audiences for arias, duets, choruses, etc. Consequently, the resulting musical drama consists almost entirely of solo speeches by characters sung in turn, 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 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" (Taruskin 1981, 258), Tchaikovsky 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.[citation needed]
Consequently, certain musical novelties of The Stone Guest stem from the above basic premise of composition. For instance, there is little recurrence of whole sections of music in the course of the work; like the verse itself, the resulting music is primarily through-composed. (Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral introduction to the opera, however, draws on themes from the music that Dargomyzhsky composed.) As if to emphasize this feature, the composer wrote the entire opera without key signatures, even though it would be possible (and practical) to re-notate the work with key signatures to reflect the various tonalities through which it passes.
In addition, the opera was novel for its time in its use of dissonance and whole-tone scales. Dargomyzhky's attempts at realism and faithfulness to the text resulted in what has been referred to as a "studied ugliness"[citation needed] in the music, apparently intended to reflect the actual ugliness in the story. Cui termed the stylistic practice of the work as "melodic recitative" for its balance between the lyric and the naturalistic.[citation needed]
[edit] Roles
| Role | Voice type | Premiere Cast 16 February 1872 (Old Style) (Conductor: Eduard Nápravník) |
|---|---|---|
| Don Juan | tenor | Fyodor Komissarzhevsky |
| Leporello, his servant | bass | Osip Petrov |
| Donna Anna | soprano | Yuliya Platonova |
| Don Carlos | baritone | Ivan Melnikov |
| Laura | mezzo-soprano | Mariya Ilyina |
| A Monk | bass | Vladimir Sobolev |
| First Guest | tenor | Vasily Vasilyev (Vasilyev II) |
| Second Guest | bass | Mikhail Sariotti |
| Statue of the Commander | bass | Vladimir Sobolev |
[edit] Synopsis
- Place: Spain
- Time: 17th century
[edit] Recordings
- Fedoseyev
- VHS 1979, (DVD 2010) Live performance, Vladimir Atlantov (Don Juan), Tamara Milashkina (Donna Anna), Alexander Vedernikov (Leporello), Tamara Sinyavskaya (Laura), Vladimir Valaitis (Don Carlos), Vladimir Filippov (A Monk/Statue of the Commander), Andrei Sokolov, Petr Glubokiy (Laura's Guests). Orchestra and Chorus of the Bolshoi Theatre, Mark Ermler.
[edit] References
- Further reading
- Taruskin, Richard "The Stone Guest". Grove Music Online (OperaBase). Accessed 26 Jun 2005 (subscription access).
- Taruskin, Richard, "The Stone Guest and its Progeny" in Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the 1860s. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1981.
