Mlada (1872)

Scenes from a Collaborative Opera-Ballet by Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin. Commissioned in 1872 by Stepan Gedeonov, director of the imperial theatres in St. Petersburg, Russia. Collaboratively taken on by five composers, it was left unfinished. Some of the music was never written or has been lost, while most of what survives exists only in short score. For the first time, the surviving original scenes and numbers of Mlada are now published in their entirety, including reconstructions of two incompletely transmitted numbers that render acts and 1 and 4 complete. This edition thus turns Mlada, this "phantom of an opera," into something palpable, something that will change our understanding of the music derived from it. Parts are available from the publisher. Full score, 477 p.