[2] Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, trans. from the fifth revised Russian edition by Judah A. Joffe, ed. with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten (London: Eulenberg, 1974), p. 397.
[3] Ibid., p. 175-178, 373. See also Gerald Abraham, Slavonic and Romantic Music: Essays and Studies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968), p. 202-203.
[4] The modifications which the composer made between the art-song version and the operatic version involve no changes in the melody, but affect orchestration, omission of certain individual bars, transposition a whole step higher, and minor adjustments of accompanying parts.
[5] This opera may be viewed as the autumnal counterpart to the spring fairy-tale opera Snowmaiden, written some twenty years earlier.
[6] Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, p. 406.
[7] The same type of verse pattern, of course, dominates the opera The Golden Cockerel.
[8] Mlada was completed in 1890, after the composer had written his three orchestral masterpieces Capriccio Espagnol, Russian Easter, and Scheherezade and after he had experienced a production of Wagner's Ring in Moscow. Ibid., p. 296-298, 307.
[9] It is interesting to compare Cui's setting of this part of the act, which he composed some twenty years earlier when Mlada was to be a collective project of Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, Musorgsky, Borodin, and Minkus [see Ex. 10]. Whereas Cui takes the obvious route and sets the text strophically, Rimsky-Korsakov proves more imaginative by expanding the text, altering the meter, and retaining the two-line text-refrain while avoiding a strictly repetitive musical setting of it. Thus, Cui's version is quite plain, matter-of-fact, and terse, a fault which pervades his entire first act.
[10] The last act of Mlada was originally assigned to Borodin, who composed some ten numbers. The closing Ab melody of his finale for Mlada, as orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov [see Ex. 11], seems to be the counterpart of Rimsky's concluding chorus, i.e. the reworked lullaby in Act IV. (See also Sergei Dianin, Borodin, trans. Robert Lord (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 270), but it obviously has no relation to Cui's first-act lullaby, except in the fact that the melody implies setting of a text in the same trochaic tetrameter as Cui's first-act lullaby. (It is interesting, if unsubstantial, to note that all three composers in their Mlada lullabies use an undulating triplet lower-neighbor figure in the accompaniments at one point or another).