Opera came fairly late to the Russian Empire: residents had to wait, indeed, until the reign of Peter the Great, who encouraged cultural and economic exchanges abroad, leading to the arrival of Italian opera at the imperial court in the first half of the 18th century. For several decades, Saint Petersburg and Moscow's upper crust was treated to exclusively Italian repertoire — but little by little, local musicians began to create Russian-language works that put the emphasis more on spoken dialogue than on the music itself. Everything changed in the 19th century, as the development of classical music in tandem with contemporaneous literary movements gave Russian composers ample material to imagine operatic works on an epic scale, and as the Napoleonic wars provided a pressing impetus to foster a national idiom. In this playlist, you'll find a selection of the most beautiful operas performed in the language of Pushkin, presented in chronological order from Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842) to Weinberg's The Idiot, composed in 1985 but not premiered until 2013!
