Glinka's Ruslan & Ludmilla was first performed on December 9, 1842, in St.Petersburg.

 

Once a popular and influential composer, Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) is primarily remembered today for two operas: A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Ruslan and Ludmilla (1842). The latter, based on the work that brought poet Alexander Pushkin his first success in 1820, seems both a perfect operatic subject and an impossibility.

 

A complicated fairy tale of love overcoming all obstacles, it features a flying dwarf who gets his power from his beard, a fight with a giant disembodied head, a rescue foiled, a slain hero resurrected, and a happy ending with the lovers reunited!

 

Glinka worked intermittently on the Opera for five years and left the composition of the overture to the last minute. Despite the inventiveness of the music and its many memorable melodies, the Opera Ruslan and Ludmilla was a failure. Nevertheless the Overture is a firm favourite and here we have an expertly crafted arrangement for brass band from the pen of Dr Robert Childs.