The one-act opera Aleko is Rachmaninoff's earliest work for the stage. It was composed, in fact, as a graduation requirement set by Rachmaninoff's composition teacher Anton Arensky at the Moscow Conservatory in 1892: every member of the class had to write a short opera on the same text. Rachmaninoff composed his in the space of seventeen days. When he played it for the board of examiners, he received the highest possible mark, which, along with his accomplishments as a pianist, won him the rarely granted Great Gold Medal of the Moscow Conservatory.

Aleko was immediately published in a piano-vocal score; its premiere at the Bolshoi Theater on October 18, 1893, was hailed by Tchaikovsky. But the opera is scarcely known outside of Russia. Its libretto, drawn from an adaptation of a poem by Alexander Pushkin that is familiar to Russians but virtually unknown anywhere else, is problematic. The title character is a wandering outcast who has thrown in his lot with a band of gypsies and has married among them. He lives only for his young wife, Zemfira. Early in the opera on old gypsy recounts how he had been abandoned by his wife years ago. This tale foreshadows Aleko’s own tragic realization that Zemfira—the daughter of the old gypsy—loves a younger man. As the lovers prepare to run away together, the enraged Aleko stabs them both. The gypsies thereupon shun him forever, and he is left condemned to a life of utter loneliness.

It is a short opera, with a simple plot, but when it was performed the young Rachmaninoff received the highest possible praise from his idol, Tchaikovsky (then in the last months of his life and the most famous of living Russian composers), who asked modestly if the newly hatched composition graduate would mind having Aleko share a double-bill with Tchaikovsky’s own most recent opera Iolanta. In an interview that he gave fifty years later, Rachmaninoff still recalled that moment with astonishment: “He literally said that: ‘Would you object . . . ?’ He was fifty-three, a famous composer, but I was a novice of twenty!”

Aleko’s cavatina (a term with no single meaning, but typically a simple aria without textual repetition) is the best known section of the opera. It finds the title character at a moment of crisis, as he debates what to do after he discovers that Zemfira has been unfaithful to him. The aria, which the famed Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin recorded three times, is in two main sections: a slow, recitative-like section in which Aleko laments his fate, and a more lyrical section in which he bitterly remembers his relationship with Zemfira. Rachmaninoff allows the singer to express Aleko’s pain, providing an accompaniment in the orchestra that supports the singer with a simple, haunting countermelody. —© Steven Ledbetter