FÜRST IGOR

In the organizer's words:

Prince Igor of Novgorod-Seversk leads his troops into a hopeless battle against the neighboring Polovtsians and is captured in the process. Meanwhile, his brother-in-law seizes power at home - until the Polovtsians strike back. In the end, Igor manages to escape. But can he and his homeland still be saved? The catastrophic effects of superfluous wars arbitrarily instigated by power-hungry leaders can still be seen today.

The chemist and amateur composer Alexander Borodin found it extremely difficult to write the popular master opera that his friends expected of him. He chose nothing less than one of the most powerful heroic epics in medieval Russian literature as his model: the "Song of Igor". Too powerful for him, who was always concerned with balancing conflicting conflicts and opposites? After 18 years of work, Borodin left the opera in fragments when he died in 1887. Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov posthumously shaped it into the work we know today - full of powerful, impressive music and including the famous "Polovtsian Dances".