ALEXANDER BORODIN (1833-1887):
PRINCE IGOR

Synopsis

Overture: Three themes in the overture are repeated. First, we hear a vigorous Russian folk dance. The oriental melody of the Polovtsi follows. The third theme is the beautiful lyrical melody of Prince Igor's aria "NoSleep, No Rest."

Prologue: The marketplace square in Poutivl, Russia in the late 12th century.

Igor, Prince of Novgorod-Seversk, prepares to lead an army against the neighboring Turkic Polovtsians and their Khans, who have previously attacked the Russian lands. The people ask for God's blessing, singing "Glory to the beautiful Sun." The sky suddenly darkens in a solar eclipse, suggesting a bad omen. The people urge Igor to abandon his campaign. Two soldiers, Skula and Yeroshka, desert, confident that Vladimir Yaroslavich, Prince Galitsky, will offer them work that is more to their liking.  Although Igor's wife Yaroslavna also begs her husband not to go to war, he reassures her, leaving both her and the command of the city in the keeping of his dissolute brother-in-law. As Prince Igor sets out on the campaign against the Polovtsi, the people sing the great chorus "Glory to the multitude of stars."

ACT I. Evening in the Polovtsian camp.

Girls sing and dance to entertain Konchakovna, the daughter of the Polovtsian chief, Khan Konchak. They begin with a hymn to the cool refreshment of evening and move on to the famous Polovtsian Dance. The Russians have been defeated, and Igor and his son Vladimir are prisoners. Konchakovna has fallen in love with Vladimir and anxiously awaits their next meeting. She sings of her expected tryst with Vladimir: "Merknet svet dnevnoy" ("The daylight dies"). When Vladimir appears, both declare their love for each other in a beautiful duet: "Ti li Vladimir moy?" ("Is it you, Vladimir mine?"). They are interrupted by the arrival of Igor, who is tormented by the Russian defeat and thinks longingly of his wife. He sings the magnificent two-part aria "Ni sna, ni otdikha" ("My tortured soul can find no rest, sleep will not come").

Ovlur, a Polovtsian who has been baptized and is a friend of the Russians, approaches Igor and offers to help him escape. At first, Igor rejects the idea as dishonorable. He then reconsiders. Konchak enters, expressing magnanimity toward his "honored guests." He assures Igor that he has been treating him as a guest of honor, not as a prisoner. He sings the aria "Zdorov li, Knyaz?" ("How goes it, Prince?") and offers to grant Igor freedom if the prince will promise never to take up arms against the Polovtsians again. Igor explains that he cannot agree to this request. Impressed with Igor's pride, Konchak orders his slave girls to entertain his guest. Their dance starts slowly and builds to a wild and exotic melody and pace. Kismet later incorporated the wonderful melodies that we hear.

ACT II

Scene 1: The courtyard of Prince Galitsky's house in Poutivl.

Feasting and carousing take place at Galitsky's house. Skula and Yeroshka lead a paean to Igor's profligate brother-in-law, recounting how he abducted a maiden for his pleasure. The chorus joins in, singing: "Slava, slava Volodimiru." The prince himself sings a wild and reckless song expressing his resolve to avoid leading a dull and dreary life. If he were governor, he would make sure all had a merry time: "Greshno tait: ya skukki ne lyublyu" ("Twere a sin to hide it: I hate a dreary life").  He claims that state and power are useless without revelry. A group of girls enters, distressed at the abduction of one of their friends. The prince mocks them, even suggesting that he himself was the abductor. Terrified, the girls leave. Galitsky's followers claim that they will set him up as the ruler in place of Prince Igor.  They sing the Princely Song "Chto u knyazya da Volodomira" ("At Prince Vladimir's"). The scene ends in drunken revelry. Skula and Erochka, the two deserters, remain alone and drunk.

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About Russian Opera

• The rise of cultivated Russian music was related to the rise of 19th century nationalism (e.g. French Revolution, 1848 failed insurrections in Prague, Hungary, Budapest, Austria, Italy, Norway, Poland, and France) and specifically to Russian fear of foreign influences. Xenophobia thus became what Robert Greenberg calls a "compositional inspiration".  Fear of foreign influence was nothing new in Russia. Peter the Great (1682-1725) had previously been the first Russian ruler to visit Europe and to bring European influence back to Russia.
• The spirit of individual freedom and nationalism that powered the failed Decembrist revolt in 1825 also impacted Russian writers, poets, and musicians. They worked to create a uniquely Russian artistic tradition. The poet and author Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837) was extremely influential. As an individualistic, nationalistic rabble-rouser, he might be compared to a left-wing hippy agitator in the United States in the 1960s.
•  Pushkin elevated the literary perception of the Russian language through the model of his own works. It's no exaggeration to say that both Russian literature and opera begin with Pushkin.  His father's side of the family was aristocratic, and his mother was descended from an Abysinnian prince who had been bought in a slave market in Constantinople.  Pushkin was knowledgeable about the masterworks of Western as well as Russian literature.  Among the operas that are based Pushkin's works are Pique Dame, Ruslan and Lyudmila, Rusalka, The Stone Guest, Boris Godunov, Eugene Onegin, Mazeppa, Aleko, The Miserly Knight, Dubrovsky, Mozart and Salieri, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Golden Cockerel, and Mavra. 
• The composers most frequently associated with Russian nationalism were first Glinka and later The Mighty Handful (sometimes called the Mighty Five), also called the Kuchka: Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin. The Five considered the Rubinstein brothers, Anton the pianist and Nicolai, the founder of the Moscow Conservatory, to be enemies of Russian music. Nicolai had spent time in Europe before founding the Conservatory, and The Five strongly opposed the European influence that he brought home with him. Cesar Cui called Anton Rubinstein "merely a Russian who composes" rather than a Russian composer. With the exception of Rimsky-Korsakov, who eventually taught at the Moscow Conservatory, Tchaikovsky didn't hold The Five in high regard.
• Russian folk music often appears in Russian opera. Although the Russian Orthodox Church frowned on instrumental performances because of their distraction to parishioners, in rural areas, the authorities allowed the peasants to use instruments such as the dudka (vertical flute), zhaleyka (single-reed wooden flute), shepherds' horns, panpipes, skripka (Russian fiddle), gusli (psaltery – plucked instrument), and the balalaika (3 stringed instrument with triangular sound board and played with fingers).

Highlights of the Opera

• In 1869, Vladimir Stasov, the influential Russian critic and public cultural intellectual, suggested to Borodin that they collaborate on an opera based on the Lay of Igor's campaign. The opera is based on a Russian chronicle called The Tale of Igor's Host, a lament for the fate of Russia during the 12th century.
• Historically, the story is about the ongoing wars among the disunited principalities of Kievan Rus' and the successive waves of invaders from the steppes and plains of Asia. The barbarous Polovtsians invade southern Russia, capturing both Prince Igor and his son Vladimir. The Polovtsian leader, Khan Konchak, entertains his prisoners lavishly, calling on his slaves to perform the famous dances and encouraging Vladimir to marry his daughter. The music of the opera contrasts the sound of Russian and oriental music. Author Richard Taruskin describes the music in the opera as the "supreme musical expression of what Russians call nega, i.e. the lush languor of the Orient as viewed through European eyes."
• Prince Igor is more than an episode from Russian history. It contains both tragedy and comedy. It highlights good and evil both within and outside of Russia. For example, Igor's brother-in-law, Prince Vladimir Galitsky, is in many respects way more evil than the enemy, Khan Konchak. There is a love theme and the fiery dances of the Polovtsi. The much-loved Polovtsian Dances is often performed as a stand-alone concert work.
• Both the libretto and the music were collaborative efforts. Taruskin calls Prince Igor a "committee project" that took Borodin 18 years not to finish! Stasov and Borodin worked together on the libretto. With respect to the music, when Borodin died prematurely, he had completed 185 of the total 710 pages. Alexander Glazunov wrote 157 pages and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote the remainder. Anatoly Lyadov also participated in the effort. Taking liberties with Borodin's original work, the posthumous collaborators discarded materials and patched over gaps with new composition. Glazunov himself wrote the Overture, relying on both Borodin's notes and on his own memory of the music that he had heard Borodin play so frequently on the piano.
• The opera's most important number is Igor's night-time soliloquy. The device was borrowed from Ivan Susanin's soliloquy in A Life for the Tsar.
• Although collaboration and posthumous tampering were far more common in Russia than in other countries, Prince Igor has a puzzling sense of incompleteness. When Igor returns home after defeat, his supporters welcome him as a hero. The message is the need for Russian unity to stave off invasions. In Igor's words, he is fighting for faith, homeland, and Rus'.
• The question of the best sequence of the scenes has never been answered. Borodin did not complete a libretto before composing the music. The opera has traditionally been performed in the edition made by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov because the story makes more sense. Nonetheless, because Act I and Act II are independent of each other, they can be reversed.
• The first performance of Prince Igor took place at the Imperial Opera House (subsequently renamed) in St. Petersburg in 1890, three years after Borodin's death. In 1892, it was performed in a private theater in Moscow. It was performed at the Bolshoi six years later. The first performance in the west took place in Paris in 1909. Sergei Diaghelev was the producer and Fyodor Chaliapin sang two roles, that of the sinister Prince Vladimir Galitsky and the huge personality Khan Konchak. In the United States, the opera was first heard in 1911 in New York. The first United States performance took place at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1915. At the time, the Met didn't sing Russian operas in Russian. The chosen language was Italian; hence Il Principe Igor. The first performance in English was at Covent Garden in 1919.
• In 2014, the Met again presented Prince Igor, this time in a production by Dmitri Tcherniakov that featured the famous field of red poppies. Like the composers who completed what Borodin failed to finish, Tcherniakov took the bold step of putting his own mark on the opera, something directors were often hesitant to do at that time but are quite willing to do today. The term for the director-imposed interpretation of operas is "Regietheatre."  To quote: "Opera is sick. Very sick. Formerly handsome and noble, its once elegant features have over recent years become ever more contorted and distorted beneath a toxic, suppurating excresence commonly known as Regietheater." 
• What exactly did Tcherniakov do? He eliminated the overture written by Glazunov that has always been so popular. He put more emphasis on Igor's internal battles, emphasizing his feelings of guilt over the defeat of his army and the shame that he has brought to his country. When Igor sings his great aria of lament, he addresses his wife, who is still at home, as if in a dream.  The Polovtsian Dances are new and different. Critic David Shengold suggested that they were based on imagery of Lucas Cranach's paintings of Paradise. Shengold also compared the choreography to "jazzercise routines at a summer sports resort." There was an unusual touch at the end of the opera as well. When Igor returns home and his people cheer him, we hear "The River Don Floods", an orchestral scene that Borodin wrote for another dramatic work.