Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, The Snow Maiden (1882)

I don't know how I'd missed this for so long, but I just came across a youtube channel by a character known only as M T (is this star Angels center fielder Mike Trout?  I don't know who ELSE it could be), which is entirely focused on uploading videos of operas with custom subtitles.  Some of these are commonly-performed works that you can see any ol' place, but there are also some great rarities that I don't think have ever been available with English subs, including--most excitingly to me--this one.  I love me some Rimsky-Korsakov, as you know.

So the Snow Maiden, Snegurochka, is the daughter of Spring and Winter.  She wants to go live with people, so her parents let her go to a nearby village.  She's mesmerized by this singer, Lel, but he goes away.  A woman named Kupava is going to marry a guy named Mizgir, but Mizgir, on seeing Snegurochka, becomes smitten with her and abandons his fiancée, even though she's expressed no interest.  This makes Kupava mad, so she goes to the Tsar for redress.  Is this something you go to the Tsar for?  Apparently.  The Tsar has his problems: the weather has been getting colder over the past few years, and he doesn't know what to do about it.  He listens to Kupava's plaints, and asks Snegurochka who she loves.  She says she loves no one (Lel not having counted, apparently), so the Tsar announces that whoever can win her heart gets a prize.  There seems to be some inchoate idea that this will make the weather better.  Lel and Kupava get together, and Snegurochka decides she's going to love Mizgir after all.  Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, this causes the Sun to come out, which causes her to melt away.  Mizgir is so disconsolate that he drowns himself.  That's a bit of a bummer, but the people sing a hymn in praise of the Sun god nonetheless.

The libretto is...a little confused, I feel.  The thing that irks me most is Mizgir, who comes across to me as kind of a douchebag in away that I don't think was intentional.  This was NRK's favorite among his own operas; I wouldn't say it's mine (The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, probably) although it IS probably at a disadvantage due to somewhat suboptimal audio and video quality (and there is absolutely no information about when or where it was performed or who's in it or anything).  Still, not too bad!  Some rousing folk dances, as he have come to expect.

It would be really ungrateful to be overly critical of M T's work here.  They're taking what must be quite a lot of time and effort to do this, all for free.  But just as a factual matter, I do have to note that the subtitles provided are a bit difficult to process.  Look at this:

GAH!  How am I meant to process this?!?  To be fair, most of them aren't quite like that--they're usually not more than two lines--but still.  You can get a general idea of what's going on, but you're never quite sure you know exactly what a given line is saying.  I will watch more from this channel, but only the rarities: if there's another way to watch an opera, with less brain-breaking subtitles, I would go with that.

Hey, guess what, M T didn't just do the full-length opera--they also did this 1952 Soviet animated version--a fascinating cultural product for sure, and one I had to watch.  In spite of being severely abridged--slightly less than half the length of the full production--it does indeed tell the whole story, complete with the tragic ending--no punches pulled, as in Disney's Little Mermaid, the original of which ends similarly, as seen in Dvořák's Rusalka, which is also based thereon.  Did this traumatize any fifties Soviet kids?  Or is it even MEANT for kids?  Who can say.  It's a good chance to listen to some more NRK music, which is fine, but the product as a whole isn't exactly what you'd call...good, even if you don't mind that there's a lot of spoken dialogue (and Lel in particular is really weird: it's a trouser role, but his spoken voice is male, only for him to suddenly become a mezzo when he starts singing).  The animation and art style in general is pretty bad.  Here, I unfairly chose the most bugly image I could find:

Egads!  But to be fairer, the characters aren't generally quite that bad, and when we just have scenery, it actually looks pretty okay:

I'd love to know more context about this thing: how and why it was produced, how it was received...interesting, at any rate.