Mlada

For the Benedictine abbess and daughter of Bohemian prince Boleslav I, see Mlada (abbess). For the 1890 opera-ballet by Rimsky-Korsakov, see Mlada (Rimsky-Korsakov).

Title page to the score of César Cui's contribution to Mlada, published "in memory of my dear comrades A. P. Borodin, M. P. Mussorgsky, and N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov" (M. P. Belyayev, Leipzig, 1911).

Mlada (Russian: Млада, the name of a main character) was a project conceived in 1870 by Stepan Gedeonov (1816–1878), director of the Saint Petersburg Imperial Theatres, originally envisioned as a ballet to be composed by Aleksandr Serov with choreography by Marius Petipa.

The project was revised in 1872 as an opera-ballet in four acts, with a libretto by Viktor Krïlov [ru]. The composition of the score was divided between César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and Aleksandr Borodin, including interpolated ballet music by Ludwig Minkus. The project was never completed, and although much of the score was composed, no performing edition is currently in use. However, a printed version, primarily in piano-vocal score, based upon materials available at the time, was published in 2016 by A-R Editions under the editorship of Albrecht Gaub.[1]

This work is not to be confused with the completed and occasionally performed opera-ballet Mlada (1890) by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, which uses the same libretto by Viktor Krylov, but is otherwise a different composition.

  1. ^ Cui, César (2016). Mlada (1872): scenes from a collaborative opera-ballet. Middleton, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, Inc. ISBN 9780895798299.