About this edition
Composed in 1898 and premiered in Moscow the following year, The Tsar's Bride stands apart from the fairy-tale worlds of Sadko and The Snow Maiden as Rimsky-Korsakov's most sustained essay in lyrical, human-scaled tragedy. Set amid the boyars and oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible's court, the opera unfolds a story of jealousy, poison, and mistaken love that culminates in one of the great soprano scenes in Russian opera, Marfa's haunting final aria. Its clear-voiced melodic writing and tautly dramatic ensembles have made it one of the most enduringly popular works in the Russian repertoire, a staple of the Mariinsky and Bolshoi stages for well over a century.
This edition reproduces the first printing of the full orchestral score, issued without date but generally placed at 1899 by the Leipzig house of M.P. Belaieff, bearing plate number 2000. Belaieff was founded by the timber merchant and philanthropist Mitrofan Belyayev specifically to publish the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Lyadov, and their circle, and he had his scores engraved in Leipzig to secure the finest craftsmanship then available in Europe. Rimsky-Korsakov himself served as one of the firm's artistic advisors alongside Glazunov and Lyadov, giving Belaieff's editions of his own works an unusually direct claim to authority. As the score in which The Tsar's Bride first reached conductors and orchestras, this first edition remains the foundational source for the work's orchestral text.
About this edition:
- Full orchestral score (complete conductor's score)
- Page size: 8.5 x 11 inches
- Reproduced from a historical public domain print
- Published by Purple 4R Publishing
Because the original Belaieff edition has long since entered the public domain, we're able to bring this handsome historical score back into print at an accessible price — putting a landmark of Russian opera directly into the hands of today's musicians, students, and scholars.
