The Stone Guest

The Stone Guest (Каменный гость in Cyrillic, Kamennyj gost' in transliteration) is an opera in three acts by Alexander Dargomyzhsky from a libretto taken almost verbatim from Alexander Pushkin's 1830 play of the same name which had been written in blank verse and which forms part of his collection Little Tragedies. It was first performed at the Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg, 16 February 1872 (Old Style). According to the composer's wishes, the last few lines of tableau 1 were composed by César Cui, and the whole was orchestrated by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Many years later, Rimsky-Korsakov revised his own orchestration of the opera, rewrote a few of Dargomyzhsky's own original passages, and added an orchestral prelude. This version, completed in 1903 and first performed in 1907 at the Bolshoi Theatre, is now considered the standard version. Performance History The Austrian premiere of the opera was given in 1928 at the Salzburg Festival, in a production by students of the Leningrad Conservatoire. In 1952 it was performed in Italian, at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival. The United States premiere of the opera was presented in 1986, by the Chamber Opera Theater of New York at the Marymount Manhattan Theater in New York City with Ron Gentry as Don Juan, Randolf Messing as Don Carlos, Sally Stevens as Donna Anna, and Vladimir Kin conducting.