Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila

Glinka's second opera, after Pushkin's early narrative poem, opened at the Bolshoi Theatre in St Petersburg on 9 December 1842 and was not a success. He had hoped to plan the work with Pushkin himself; the poet's death in 1837 forced him onto other librettists, and much of the plot and many of the characters were altered in the process. The opera has never held the stage firmly, but its overture became a fixture of Russian orchestral programmes. Its closing idea — a descending whole-tone scale for the sorcerer Chernomor — set a convention for depicting the supernatural.