About this edition
Composed in the aftermath of the wrenching personal crisis that followed his marriage, Mazeppa finds Tchaikovsky at his most dramatically unguarded. Drawn from Pushkin's narrative poem Poltava, the opera tells of the aging Cossack hetman Mazeppa's fatal love for the young Maria and his role in a doomed rebellion against Peter the Great — a story of political betrayal, generational conflict, and ruin that Tchaikovsky matched with some of his most searing orchestral writing, including the famous battle scene "Poltava" and Maria's devastating final lullaby over her condemned lover. It is a score of real scale and ambition, rarely heard complete but treasured by those who know it for its psychological depth and orchestral color.
This edition reproduces the first edition full orchestral score, issued in Moscow by P. Jurgenson, undated but datable to circa 1899 (plate number 5799). Jurgenson was Tchaikovsky's principal Russian publisher and the house responsible for bringing nearly the whole of his output — operas, symphonies, and chamber works alike — into print during and after his lifetime. As the original engraving of the full score, this Jurgenson edition stands as the primary printed source for the opera, the text from which subsequent study and performance materials have descended.
- Format: full orchestral score
- Page size: 8.5 x 11 inches
- Reproduced from a public domain historical source
- Published by Purple 4R Publishing
This edition reproduces a historical score that has entered the public domain, and we're glad to make it available again in a clean, printed format — a small way of keeping a remarkable work within easy reach of conductors, orchestral musicians, students, and anyone curious to study Tchaikovsky's dramatic imagination on the page.
