Tchaikovsky: Iolanta

Tchaikovsky’s fairy tale opera Iolanta premiered in 1892 as a double bill alongside his famous Nutcracker. 

It tells the story of a blind princess who is unaware of her blindness. Iolanta lives in a secluded garden, sheltered from the outside world, until the arrival of a young knight, Count Vaudémont, who stumbles upon her garden. He is smitten with her, and inadvertently reveals her condition to her when he asks her for a red rose, to which she replies, “What does ‘red’ mean?”

Vaudémont immediately grasps that she is blind, and proceeds to tell her about light and vision, concepts that she has never encountered. She is eager to learn more about the world and about these new concepts, but she decides that she does not actually need them in order to experience beauty or to survive, as she has developed her own ways of interacting with the world. The opera concludes with a hymn praising love and truth.

Presented in collaboration with the Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Sung in Russian, with English supertitles. Accompanied by full orchestra.