Kraków Opera: The Soldier's Tale

Composer: Igor Stravinsky
Ballet-poetic performance
Polish narration

The origin of  The Soldier’s Tale is pretty interesting, taking into account the fact that the piece was written by such a serious composer. At the end of World War I, Igor Stravinsky, by then an acclaimed composer and the author of famous ballets (The Rite of Spring and The Firebird), had some financial problems. After the revolution in Russia it turned out that he lost his whole fortune there. His former associate, C.F. Ramuz, found himself in a similar position so they decided to write a piece together and stage it all around Europe. The form itself is equally unusual: it is a combination of music, theatre and dance. Moreover, Stravinsky was the first composer in the history of classical music to include… elements of jazz in his work.

The composition tells the story of a young soldier who, on his way home from war, comes across the devil disguised as an old man. The old man offers him a book in exchange for the soldier’s fiddle. The soldier doesn’t understand the book, so in order to learn something about it, he decides to live in the devil’s house for three days. However, when, after three days, the devil takes the soldier home, it turns out that three years, not days, have passed and the soldier's friends run away from him thinking that he is a ghost…

This moral play, accompanied by music in the form of a suite for seven instruments, is based on a Russian fairy tale. The chamber piece has already been staged in many versions, in Kraków Opera it will be a ballet performance. The author of the spectacle is the Russian choreographer Elena Bogdanovich, who cooperates with the Bolshoi Theatre.

Chamber Stage