The Stone Guest

The Stone Guest is a poetic drama by Aleksandr Pushkin based on the Spanish legend of Don Juan. "The Stone Guest" was written in 1830 as part of his four short stories known as "The Little Tragedies". The Stone Guest was written after the familiar Don Juan legend, but while most traditional adaptations present it as farcical and comedic, Pushkin's "little tragedy" is indeed a romantic tragedy. Save for the duel there is little action, and though written in the form of a play, it is agreed by scholars that it was never meant for the stage.

Related Topics:
Aleksandr Pushkin - Spanish - Don Juan - Farcical - Comedic - Tragedy - Duel

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This tragedy was later turned into an opera set directly to Pushkin's verse by Alexander Sergeyevich Dargomïzhsky. The opera, completed by César Cui after Dargomizhky's death and orchestrated by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, premiered in 1872. Pushkin himself was inspired to write the drama after seeing a production of Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Related Topics:
Alexander Sergeyevich Dargomïzhsky - César Cui - Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - Mozart - Don Giovanni

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The Stone Guest is notable as an opera for having its text taken directly from the written work which inspired it, and not a libretto derived from it; this was taken as a radical statement about the deamnds of written and musical drama and was in fact considered a devaluation of the idea of musical form as distinct from spoken drama. Tchaikovsky in particular was critical of the idea; in response to Dargomizhky'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. Relatedly, there is very little musical repetition throughout the work; like the verse itself the music was primarily through-composed.

Related Topics:
Libretto - Tchaikovsky - Through-composed

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The opera was novel for its time in its use of dissonance and whole-tone scales, and the oft-mentioned "studied ugliness" of the music intended to reflect the actual ugliness in the story, in Dargomizhky's attempts at realism and remaining faithful to the writing. Cui termed the work a "melodic recitative" for its balance between the lyric and the naturalistic.

Related Topics:
Dissonance - Whole-tone scale - Recitative

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