Cavatina of Aleko (Ves' tabor spit) (Aleko)

Aleko was Rachmaninoff's graduation exercise at the Moscow Conservatory: a one-act opera on Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko's libretto after Pushkin's poem The Gypsies, written in seventeen days in the spring of 1892 by a composer of nineteen. It earned him the highest mark the institution awarded. Tchaikovsky, who sat on the examining panel, helped it to the stage of the Bolshoi, where it was first performed on 9 May 1893. The debts to Tchaikovsky and to Mascagni are audible, but the orchestral intermezzo and Aleko's cavatina already carry the melodic breadth of the later concertos.