Pyotr Tchaikovsky, The Enchantress (1887)

Enough of that! Back to Grim Tragedy. It's always good to use the word antepenultimate when possible, so let it be noted that this is Tchaikovsky antepenultimate opera, followed only by The Queen of Spades and Iolanta.

So...Nastasya, commonly known as Kuma, is an innkeeper, popular with the people. But there's a puritanical clerk, Mamyrov, who thinks she's a witch and wants the whole thing shut down. Nikita, a prince, appears to check things out, but Nastasya charms him and he humiliates Mamyrov by making him dance. Meanwhile, Nikita's wife Yevpraksiya is grumpy because she thinks that her husband is involved with Nastasya--she has bewitched him. Her son Yury appears and vows to kill her to avenge this. Nikita puts the moves on Nastasya, but she repulses him and he leaves, enraged. Yury appears and she reveals that actually, it's him she loves, and he decides that he loves her back. They're going to run off together, his parents having disowned him, but things do not go so well. To put it mildly. While Yury is off hunting boars, Yevpraksiya appears disguised as a peasant and offers Nastasya a drink of water, which she accepts. Bad idea! Yury reappears and she dies in his arms. Nikita appears and, thinking that she must be hidden somewhere, murders his son in a rage. He realizes the truth, goes mad, and dies. Fun for all ages!  It IS one of those operatic-tragedy plots where the only real message seems to be "life's a bitch and then you die," but hey, we're used to that.

I mean freakin' 'eck, man. It's late Tchaikovsky; how is it not gonna be good? The libretto is a little convoluted, but hey, both Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades have plot issues of their own, and that doesn't prevent them from being part of the standard repertoire, so why not more love for this one? As it is, there is only one video, from 1984, from the famous Nizhegorodsky State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (I wonder what it was like to be a classical musician in the waning days of the Soviet Union). The image quality isn't fantastic--it looks like it was indifferently transferred to DVD from a VHS tape--which it almost certainly was (that's also probably why there's a plot synopsis before each act--the original likely wasn't subtitled). I don't mind that, but the sound is a bit muddy as well, which is a bigger issue. It's certainly listenable, but I think for the opera to get a fair critical shake, there's going to need to be a better-quality recording made available.

This is my thirtieth Russian-language opera, incidentally.  Before I started keeping track of these things, I had this idea that Russian was a more prominent operatic language than German, but that clearly isn't true.  It seems firmly ensconced in fifth place, in no danger from sixth-place Czech but likewise no danger to fourth-place German.  I'm not convinced that, with what's currently available, I'd actually be able to reach forty.