Once a popular and influential composer, Mikhail Glinka is primarily remembered today for two operas: A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Ruslan and Ludmila (1842). The latter, based on the work that brought the poet Alexander Pushkin his first success in 1820, seems both a perfect operatic subject and an impossibility. A complicated fairy tale of love overcoming all obstacles, it features a flying dwarf who gets his power from his beard, a fight with a giant disembodied head, a rescue foiled, a slain hero resurrected, and a happy ending with the lovers reunited. Glinka had hoped to work on the opera with Pushkin himself, but the poet's premature death made that impossible. Instead, Glinka writes, a friend, Konstantin Bakhturin, ``... took it upon himself to work out the plan of the opera, and did it in just a quarter of an hour while drunk.'' A lesser poet, Valerian Shirkov, stepped in to write the libretto.
Glinka worked intermittently, requiring five years to complete the work. Even then, in the custom of many of his contemporaries, he left the composition of the overture to the last minute, writing ``... often in the producer's room during rehearsals.'' But despite the inventiveness of the music and its many memorable melodies, Ruslan and Ludmila was a resounding failure, prompting the embittered composer to give up on opera with the prophetic remark, ``It may be recognized in a hundred years.''
© 2000, Geoff Kuenning
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