Aleko

Aleko was Rachmaninoff's graduation exercise, written in seventeen days in the spring of 1892 and rewarded with the Conservatory's gold medal. The one-act libretto is by the director and playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, after Pushkin's poem The Gypsies. The Bolshoi staged it on 9 May 1893, and Rachmaninoff conducted it in Kiev that October. Tchaikovsky liked the opera enough to propose pairing it with his own Iolanta and arranged a Bolshoi performance for the following December; his sudden death prevented it. Chaliapin sang Aleko at the Pushkin centenary in 1899.