Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta

Tchaikovsky Music

Prior to the performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra on 25 October 2008, Cambridge fellow Marina Frolova-Walker will talk about the opera and its place in Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre and the repertoire in general.

Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta
‘I am more than ever in love with her’, Tchaikovsky wrote of Iolanta, the blind protagonist of his final opera, as he became increasingly embroiled in her plight and progressively steadfast in his will to communicate it. The resulting opera is a work of discovery: Iolanta’s awakening into a world of vision and light; her rescuer Vaudémont’s emergence into the realms of love and passion; and Tchaikovsky’s move to often delicate, intimate music. The orchestra carries the emotional truths, itself moving from darkness to light: from the stark wind ensemble of the opera’s opening bars to ethereal, fragrant strings.

Marina graduated at the Moscow Conservatoire and is now senior lecturer in music in the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Clare College. She writes and lectures widely on Russian music, and has contributed many articles to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Oxford Companion to Music.

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