Glinka, Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture
Yes, that’s a little guy on a horse about to do battle with a giant’s head. Not a whole giant, just the Head. So we must be deep into some fairy tale—in this case Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmilla.
Ludmilla has been kidnapped during her wedding to Ruslan, and her father now intends to give her hand in marriage to anyone who rescues her. So Ruslan is kind of back at square one. The giant’s Head was separated from the rest of him awhile back by the giant’s dwarf brother using the sword that was destined to destroy them both. So the Head is no longer terribly fond of the brother who just happens to be the guy who kidnapped Ludmilla. Gosh these plots are complicated!
Of course, Ruslan kills the Head (for real this time), gets the sword, rescues Ludmilla, kills the villain, finds the magic ring, rescues Ludmilla after she is kidnapped a second time (Ludmilla seems a bit disaster-prone), and finally marries her.
Would I have done all that for Professor Carol? It might be worth it just to have that story to tell when people ask, “So how did you two meet?”
Anyway, Aleksander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837), turned some of Russia’s traditional folk tales into poetic masterpieces on his way to becoming the father of Russian literature. But I don’t need to tell you about Pushkin because Professor Carol has done that several times on this site. If that link doesn’t satisfy your curiosity, you can always sign up for her Imperial Russia course.
But we still have to say something about Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) who wrote the opera Ruslan and Ludmilla based on the Pushkin poem. The opera premiered in 1842, six years after his first operatic hit, A Life for the Tsar. Glinka is credited with being the first native-born composer to gain international prominence. Glinka’s use of folk melodies in the opera is in keeping with the subject matter and also presages the rise of nationalism and the movement away from German and Italian models toward an authentic Russian sound.
