Yuliy Meitus, Stolen Happiness (1960)

Here's another opera based on the work of Ivan Franko.  Is he the Ukrainian Pushkin?

So we are among peasants.  Anna is married to Mykola.  She carries a torch for a guy named Mykhailo, but he has disappeared in some unspecified way, and apparently her brothers tricked her in to marrying Mykola (the nature of this trickery never being specified).  But whaddaya know: Mykhailo reappears.  And Mykola is arrested for murder.  A year passes, and rumors are flying that Anna is involved with Mykhailo (given the shape of the opera, I don't think this is meant to be the case at the time--at least not physically).  They're dancing and having a good time when Mykola is released from prison, the real killers having been found.  A week passes, and now Anna is totally inflamed for Mykhailo.  He barges into their house, and after a confrontation, Mykola goes to a tavern to drink away his troubles.  When he comes back, he and Mykhailo (who has been drinking too) have a fight, and the latter is killed, and now Mykola himself is going to die, his happiness having been stolen.  God knows what's going to happen to Anna, but probably not anything too good.

This was a very fine opera, I thought.  I got really caught up in the story, simple though it is.  In contrast to The Reluctant Matchmaker, I was able to follow the action here well enough, but I really found myself longing for subtitles so I could get a clearer idea of the precise ins and outs of it all.  The Lviv Opera website says that it's considered very subtle and psychologically probing, which is certainly believable, but naturally, my understanding is limited.

Great music, too.  There are a few really infectious folk dances, and the scene where Anna and Mykola give in to their passion is very dramatic.  One touch that worked really well in this production is that, for the first and only time in the piece, Anna removes her headscarf, an obvious but still clever metaphor for her releasing her true feelings.

Yeah, man.  There are a lot of great operas that you'll never know about unless you specifically seek them out.  More like this, please.