The Marriage (Opera)
| Work data | |
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| Title: | The marriage |
| Original title: | Женитьба |
| Original language: | Russian |
| Music: | Modest Mussorgsky |
| Literary source: | The marriage of Nikolai Gogol |
| Premiere: | 1909 |
| Place and time of the action: | Russia in the 1st half of the 19th century |
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The Marriage ( Russian Женитьба Schenitba ) is a fragment of an opera by Modest Mussorgsky based on motifs from the comedy of the same name by Nikolai Gogol from 1868. Mussorgsky dedicated the design of the opera to the art critic Stassov . The composer Alexander Dargomyschski and the music critic César Cui gave him the impetus for this opera .
The opera is about the marriage of a Russian couple. The vain and weak of character Podkolesin is urged by his energetic friend Kočkarev to marry the graceful Fekla Ivanovna . The fourth person is Podkolesin's servant Stepan .
Mussorgsky wanted people to express themselves on stage just like ordinary people, so that the music should also reflect the different characters and behaviors of these four people. With regard to this desired realism, this opera comes closest to Dmitri Shostakovich's opera The Nose .
literature
- Piero Santi: About "The Marriage". In: Heinz-Klaus Metzger , Rainer Riehn (Hrsg.): Modest Musorgskij - Aspects of the opera work (= music concepts . 21). edition text + kritik, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-88377-093-0 , pp. 41–44.
Web links
- The Marriage : Sheet Music and Audio Files in the International Music Score Library Project