Opera tonight – Rimsky-Korsakov’s Christmas Eve

It’s Christmas in the Ukrainian village of Dikanka and the blacksmith Wakula is unhappily in love with Oksana, daughter of a landowner. She only wants to marry him on the condition that he gets her the Tsarina’s golden shoes. In desperation, Wakula turns to the devil to fly him to the capital and help him procure the shoes. Will this be enough to win the hand of Oksana?

Rimsky-Korsakov’s Christmas Eve is a satirical-realistic depiction of Ukrainian village life combined with fantastic and mythological elements brought to you by Slippedisc, courtesy of OperaVision. It is a feast of villagers’ Christmas songs, lyrical arias, buffo scenes and dance numbers set to orchestral interludes. The relationship between man and nature, between the individual and the cosmos is at the centre of the opera. Rimsky-Korsakov himself wrote the libretto based on Gogol’s story of the same name. As an avowed pantheist, the composer saw nature as an image of the divine – and thus as something absolutely worth preserving. He added mythological elements of pagan folk belief; he has stars dancing in the sky and the apparition of human-looking sun gods. The composer shows the meaningfulness and beauty of a cosmos in whose biological and seasonal rhythms human beings are suspended – in this production quite literally. Directed by Christof Loy and conducted by Sebastian Weigle, this rendition of Christmas Eve won OpernWelt’s Production of the Year 2021/22.

Available on 3 December 2022  at 1900 CET/1800London/1300NY