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Aleksandr Ostrovskii

Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovskii (Александр Николаевич Островский), or Alexander Ostrovsky, was one of the leading Russian dramatists of the nineteenth century, born in Moscow on 31 March/12 April 1823.

The son of a mercantile lawyer in Moscow, Ostrovsky studed law at the University of Moscow (1840-1843), and worked for the Court of Commerce and Commercial Court in Moscow. However, his theatrical interests were also strong, and extracts from his first play A Family Affair (Семейная картина) were published in 1847. The publication of his play, The Bankrupt (Банкрут) in 1850 resulted in an uproar within the merchant class of Moscow; it was banned until 1863 and led to his dismissal from the civil service. During the following decade Ostrovskii produced many historical plays which were well-received, and he became closely associated with the Maly Theatre in Moscow, where the majority of his plays were produced under his supervision.

In 1864 Tchaikovsky wrote an overture to Ostrovskii's 1859 play The Storm, which was his first large-scale orchestral piece. Although written as student summer exercise, according to Modest Tchaikovsky, the composer also considered setting it as the basis for an opera, although this idea was never realised. However, Ostrovskii's 1865 comedy Dream on the Volga (Сон на Волге), did serve as the basis for Tchaikovsky's first opera, The Voevoda, Op. 3 (1867-68), with the author himself providing parts of the libretto. By this time Tchaikovsky had already supplied two short numbers of incidental music for Ostrovskii's Dmitrii the Pretender and Vasilii Shuiskii, which were performed at the premiere of that 'dramatic chronicle' in 1867.

Their next collaboration was on The Snow Maiden (1873), a musical drama commissioned by the Imperial Theatres to be written by Ostrovskii and performed with Tchaikovsky's incidental music. However, Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov's operatic setting of the same subject (1881) has proved far more enduring than the original.

In 1874 Ostrovskii became the first president of the Society of Russian Playwrights, and in 1885 he was named artistic director for the Moscow Imperial Theatres. Shortly after this, in 1886, he communicated a request to Tchaikovsky via an intermediary to provide a music to accompany a scene in The Voevoda - not the compoers's first opera, but a revised version of Ostrovski''s original play Dream on the Volga.

Aleksandr Ostrovskii died at in Slykova, Russia, on 2/14 June 1886, aged 63.

See also:

• Wikipedia entry for Alexandr Ostrovsky (external site)

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