Snow blindness

Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden has not received a professional staging in the UK for 60 years. Think about that for a moment, and what it says about British operatic priorities. Sixty years of Massenet and early Verdi, of Manon Lescaut and Donizetti ‘rediscoveries’. Not that those aren’t worth having, as part of a healthy and balanced operatic diet. But the fact that during those six decades no major company showed any curiosity about an acknowledged masterpiece by one of the 19th century’s most prolific and original musical dramatists is perverse, to say the least. The musicologist Richard Taruskin, who’s nobody’s idea of a soft touch, points out that in addition to his own 16 operas Rimsky-Korsakov was also largely responsible for establishing operas by Glinka, Borodin and Mussorgsky in the repertoire. Rimsky, he concludes, is ‘perhaps the most underrated composer of all time’. I’ll buy that.

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Brendan O’Neill

The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

Well, The Snow Maiden is back now, in all its fairy-tale wonder. Is that part of the problem? The term ‘fairy tale’ — especially when coupled to another two words too often and too glibly attached to this composer, ‘folk opera’ — doesn’t remotely cover the richness of what Rimsky-Korsakov achieves here. Snegurochka the Snow Maiden, illegitimate daughter of winter and spring, yearns for love and a warmth that can only ever mean her doom. Rimsky, a nature-worshipper with a powerful instinct for myth, manages to balance the story’s symbolism of seasonal renewal with an intensely human mixture of pathos and joy, sometimes in the same musical instant. It’s never heavy-handed. The clarity and colour of Rimsky’s storytelling draw you in even as a sense of something eternal and implacable pushes through from beneath, occasionally breaking the surface, like a mammoth erupting from some Siberian glacier, in massive hymn-like choruses.