Dream on the Volga
Dream on the Volga (Russian: Сон на Волге) is an opera in four acts composed by Anton Arensky. The libretto was adapted by Arensky from Alexander Ostrovsky's melodrama Voyevoda. The opera premiered on January 2, 1891 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow with Arensky conducting. Background Dream on the Volga was Arensky's first opera. He began working on it while still a student in Rimsky-Korsakov's composition class at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and finished it in 1890. Tchaikovsky, whose music also had a significant influence on Arensky, had twenty years earlier adapted the Ostrovsky play as an opera, The Voyevoda. However, Tchaikovsky was so dissatisfied with his own version that he later destroyed the manuscript score. Arensky's version was a much closer adaptation of the play than Tchaikovsky's which had condensed Ostrovsky's original five acts down to three. Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Modest that he had not been very impressed when Arensky had played him fragments of the opera in St. Petersburg, but after going through the completed score in the summer of 1890 and then after seeing the premiere, he was convinced that it was one of the best Russian operas. He considered the music "very elegant" but