The Stone Guest (Dargomyzhsky)

The Stone Guest ("Каменный гость" in Cyrillic, "Kamennyj gost' " in transliteration) is an opera in three acts by Alexander Dargomyzhsky from a libretto taken almost verbatim from Alexander Pushkin's 1830 play of the same name which had been written in blank verse and which forms part of his collection "Little Tragedies".
It was first performed at the Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg, 16 February 1872 (Old Style).
According to the composer's wishes, the last few lines of tableau 1 were composed by César Cui, and the whole was orchestrated by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Many years later, Rimsky-Korsakov revised his own orchestration of the opera, rewrote a few of Dargomyzhsky's own original passages, and added an orchestral prelude. This version, completed in 1903 and first performed in 1907 at the Bolshoi Theatre, is now considered the standard version.
Performance History.
The Austrian premiere of the opera was given in 1928 at the Salzburg Festival, in a production by students of the Leningrad Conservatoire. In 1952 it was performed in Italian, at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival. The United States premiere of the opera was presented in 1986, by the Chamber Opera Theater of New York at the Marymount Manhattan Theater in New York City with Ron Gentry as Don Juan, Randolf Messing as Don Carlos, Sally Stevens as Donna Anna, and Vladimir Kin conducting.
Style.
As an opera, "The Stone Guest" is notable for having its text taken almost word-for-word from the literary stage work which inspired it, rather than being set to a libretto adapted from the source in order to accommodate opera audiences which would have expected to hear arias, duets, and choruses. Consequently, the resulting musical drama consists almost entirely of solos given in turn by each character, as in a spoken play.
This procedure amounted to a radical statement about the demands of spoken and musical drama and was seen by some as a devaluation of the musical genre of opera, and distinct from the literary genre of spoken drama. Tchaikovsky in particular was critical of the idea; in response to Dargomyzhky's statement that "I want sound directly to express the word. I want truth", he wrote in his private correspondence that nothing could be so "hateful and false" as the attempt to present as musical drama something that was not.
The value of the opera.
The opera was written at the time of the formation of realism in art, and "The Stone Guest" corresponded to this genre. Dargomyzhsky used the ideas of the society of The Five.
The great innovations of this opera are seen in its style. It was written without arias and ensembles (not counting two small romances sung by Laura) and it is entirely built on the "melodic recitative" of the human voice put to music. This was immediately noted by Russian musical specialists César Cui and Alexander Serov.
Opera has been greatly important in the formation of Russian musical culture which, built entirely on European music, found its place in the world's musical culture.
The innovations begun by Dargomyzhsky were continued by other composers. Firstly, they were taken up and developed by Modest Mussorgsky who called Dargomyzhsky "the teacher of musical truth". Later the principles of Dargomyzhsky’s art were embodied by Mussorgsky in his operas "Boris Godunov" and "Khovanshchina"; Mussorgsky continued and strengthened this new musical tradition. Other Russians operas have also incorporated the same stylistic elements, including settings of the three remaining "Little Tragedies" of Pushkin. These are "Mozart and Salieri" by Rimsky-Korsakov (1898); "Feast in Time of Plague" by Cesar Cui (1901); and "The Miserly Knight" by Sergei Rachmaninov (1904).
The modern Russian music critic Viktor Korshikov thus summed up:
Music.
Consequently, certain musical novelties of "The Stone Guest" stem from the above basic premise of composition. For instance, there is little recurrence of whole sections of music in the course of the work; like the verse itself, the resulting music is primarily through-composed. (Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral introduction to the opera, however, draws on themes from the music that Dargomyzhsky composed.) As if to emphasize this feature, the composer wrote the entire opera without key signatures, even though it would be possible (and practical) to re-notate the work with key signatures to reflect the various tonalities through which it passes.
In addition, the opera was novel for its time in its use of dissonance and whole-tone scales. Dargomyzhky's attempts at realism and faithfulness to the text resulted in what has been referred to as a "studied ugliness" in the music, apparently intended to reflect the actual ugliness in the story. Cui termed the stylistic practice of the work as "melodic recitative" for its balance between the lyric and the naturalistic.
Recordings.
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References.
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Further reading