Personalities | Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin | High Romantic | Opera

1799–1837, Russian

Russian composers of the High Romantic era were able to enjoy a ready-made source of stories for operas in the works of Alexander Pushkin. His first success was the romantic poem Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820), which Glinka used for his opera of the same name, first performed in 1842. Pushkin produced not only poetry, but essays, blank-verse historical dramas, such as Boris Godunov, and novels in verse like Eugene Onegin (1830). Both Boris and Onegin were used as the basis for operas, by Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky respectively, but these were only two among a long list of Pushkin stories to be given this treatment. In all, 109 operas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were based on stories by Pushkin. The poet himself became the subject of operas dealing with his exile in 1820, his liberal politics and his death in a duel in 1837.

Introduction | High Romantic | Opera
Personalities | Camille Saint-Saëns | High Romantic | Opera

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