Lidiya Sukharevskaya

Based on a Russian folk tale, Vasilisa Prekrasnaya (Vasilisa the Beautiful) is about a father whose three sons go out to finds themselves brides. Two of the boys come home with perfectly normal girls, but the youngest brother, Ivanushka, brings home a frog from the marshes. His father finds this most curious, but what he does not know was that the frog was actually a beautiful girl named Vasilisa who was cursed by a magical serpent whom she refused to marry.

Saint Petersburg, 1858. A group of composers known as The Five meet at Balakirev's. Young Modest Mussorgsky, both a civil servant and a musician, has become a fixture there. He tells about the first opera he plans to compose. Then he goes to the country where he discovers the lowly conditions of the peasants and the bloody conflicts with the rich land owners. He works on Gogol's 'The Marriage', trying to render into music the natural accents of the play's naturalistic dialogue. (Guy Bellinger)