3 numbers from Aleko

No.8 Duettino: “Yesco odno”

No.9 Cradle Scene: “Stariy muz”

No.10 Aleko’s Cavatina: “Ves’tabor spit”

If every Russian opera inspired by Pushkin were removed from the repertoire the loss would be catastrophic. There would be no Ruslan and Ludmila, no Boris Godunov, no Tsar Saltan, no Golden Cockerel, no Eugene Onegin, no Queen of Spades, to name only those works which would be most sorely missed. There would be no Aleko either. While Rachmaninov’s first opera, based on Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies, cannot equal the stature of those earlier masterpieces, the composer is scarcely to blame. Indeed, considering that Nemirovich-Danchenko’s clumsily adapted one-act libretto was forced on him as a graduation exercise at the Moscow Concervatoire in 1892, when he was only 19, Aleko is a remarkable achievement – as the authorities recognised by awarding him the Grand Medal of the Conservatoire and mounting a production at the Bolshoi a year later.

The story of Aleko is not unlike that of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, which had been an anormous successon its first performance in Moscow in 1891. Aleko has taken refuge from bourgeois life in the city to travel with a band of gypsies and has married a gypsy girl, Zemfira, who has a child by him. She, however, falls in love with a gypsy boy and insists that, according to their lore, she is free to join him. After an orchestral Intermezzo matching the celebrated example in Cavalleria Rusticana, Aleko catches Zemfira with her lover and, in a fit of jealousy, kills them both. His punishment is to be driven out of the gypsy company.

Since it is constructed in numbers, with no connecting material between them, Aleko can be excerpted without doing violence to the score. The first of this evening’s three (consecutive) extracts is a rapturously lyrical duet for Zemfira and her gypsy lover, “Just one more kiss,” as they take leave of each other before she hurries away to her jealous husband and the baby in their tent. It is followed by a Cradle Scene which, far from being a cradle song, is an expression of defiance from Zemfira who, when when Aleko objects, taunts him with lyrically erotic memories of her nocturnal meetings with her lover. Perhaps the most familiar number from the opera, since it was adopted and made famous by Chaliapin, Aleko’s Cavatina, “The whole camp sleeps.” is a dramatic monologue with a tenderly poetic middle section as Aleko remembers better days with Zemfira and a doom-laden ending. If calls Rachmaninov’s hero Tchaikovsky to mind, it is no less effective for that.