Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Folk” Operas

The smallest of the three categories that classify the operas of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is the one of “folk operas.” There are only two operas in this category, May Night, completed in 1880, and Christmas Eve, completed in 1895. Both of them are based on tales that Nikolai Gogol collected under the title Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. As the Wikipedia page for this book observes, these eight stories capture the author’s “early impressions and memories of childhood” realized as “pictures of peasant life.” The tales that Rimsky-Korsakov set are two of four tales based on specific calendar occasions.

Tenor Leonid Sobinov in the role of Levko, who sings many of the “folk songs” in the opera May Night (1909 photograph from the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Gogol’s “May Night” has as a subtitle “the Drowned Maiden.” It encompasses a generous amount of plot for a short story, which may explain why Rimsky-Korsakov realized it as a three-act opera. The narrative is set in the early nineteenth century during “Rusalka week,” the proper noun referring to young maidens that drown themselves out of grief. (This differs from the Czech connotation of the noun, which served as the basis for Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 114 Rusalka opera.) The overall plot of the opera is more than a little convoluted, but the score has a generous share of both solo and choral music that can be associated with folk sources.

Christmas Eve also involves a plot based in the supernatural, which has nothing to do with the Nativity. Rather, it involves a widow (Solokha) presumed to be a witch that plots with the Devil to steal the moon. The opera is structured in nine tableaux distributed over four acts. Over the course of the opera one encounters both the moon and the stars at play. There is also a grand polonaise episode, whose music will be familiar to anyone that knows Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin. I have not been able to establish whether Tchaikovsky appropriated the theme from a folk source. In general, however, Rimsky-Korsakov seems to draw on fewer “folk references” in unfolding the bizarre but engaging plot that unfolds in Christmas Eve.

Neither of these operas has enjoyed much exposure before Western audiences. Having listened to (and enjoyed) the music, I would confess that my personality is more curious where Christmas Eve is concerned. Nevertheless, I would probably jump at an opportunity to see either of these operas in performance.