The Night Before Christmas - Opera - Premiere

Dear members

Tonight is the premiere of the night before Christmas, A true Christmas song. Opera in four acts Protected content .
Composer Nikolai Rimski-Korsakow. Libretto by the composer, based on the eponymous narrative by Nikolai W. Gogol.

When the nights are at their longest, frosty wind and snow storms sweep the land, it is the time of the Koliada – of the pagan winter solstice feast and the Christian-orthodox Christmas celebration in equal measure. In these magical “twelve days of Christmas” the barrier between the human world and the realm of dark beings becomes especially thin. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “true” Christmas song, Die Nacht vor Weihnachten, based on the eponymous story by Nikolai Gogol, also plays out in this very same period.
The composer skilfully combines elements of Slavic fairytales and folklore, satirical village comedies and surreal dream worlds with one another, and thus contrasts the Christian Christmas traditions with pagan figures and rituals. In doing so he ties in Christmas with the cycle of the solar year and creates a world in which the Ukrainian Koliada singing (similar to the Christian tradition of carol singing), church bells, devils, witches, nature deities and the battle between bright and dark spirits during the winter solstice, the “birth of the sun”, exist alongside one another.

Tickets: EUR Protected content 193 Protected content