In 1856 Charles Gounod began work on a libretto based on scenes from the life of Ivan the Terrible, or Ivan IV. He completed it by 1858, but no company wanted to perform it, so he destroyed most of the manuscript, but kept some of the music for use in later operas. For example, he soldier’s chorus from Faust was music Gounod originally wrote for Ivan the Terrible.
Then around 1862, Gounod gave the libretto to his student and friend, the 24 year old Georges Bizet, and Bizet worked on it in the same general time span as he composed The Pearl Fishers. As with Gounod’s version, no one seemed interested. The Paris Opera never even answered his request about a possible performance.
So Bizet and everyone else forgot about Ivan the Terrible, until it was found in the papers of Bizet’s widow’s second husband in 1929, finally receiving a full performance in 1946, and tonight on the Lyric Stage we have some selections from Bizet’s long forgotten work, Ivan IV, or Ivan the Terrible. We will also have a love duet from Massenet's Manon.
The story is about Ivan the Terrible, so it is fairly bloodthirsty. The predatory Tsar demands the Boyar Tamrouk give him his daughter Marie. Tamrouk refuses, and there is much back and forth intrigue and side changing. The result is traitors overthrow Ivan, but not before Marie relents and Ivan sets a wedding date with her. They sing a duet together. Then, fed by false reports of Marie’s plot to kill him, he orders her executed. But then the traitors overthrow him, but enforce Maries’s execution anyway.
