Boyarina Morozova (opera)

Boyaryna Morozova (1887) by Vasily Surikov depicting the Boyarina's arrest by Orthodox Believers, depicting an elderly Old Believer woman being arrested and carried off on a sled, with two fingers raised in an Old Believer sign of the cross.

Boyarina Morozova (Боярыня Морозова) is a 2006 choral opera by Rodion Shchedrin based on his own libretto on the story of Boyarina Morozova (d.1675), from the account of archbishop Avvakum^[1] and inspired by the painting Boyarina Morozova by Vasily Surikov.^[2]

References

1. Neue Zeitschrift für Musik: NZ - Volume 169 - Page 288 2008 - Wie bei seinen früheren Bühnenwerken verfasste Shchedrin auch das Libretto der Choroper Boyarina Morozova selbst. Hier schöpfte er vornehmlich aus Awwakums Auto- biografie, dessen Schrift über das Leben der Bojarin Morosowa und
2. Opera - Volume 58, Issues 1-7 - Page 325 2007 "The Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, currently resident in Germany, returned to Moscow for the premiere of his Boyarina Morozova on October 30 in the great hall of the Moscow Conservatory, the opening event of the annual Moscow autumn contemporary music festival. Like many a Russian opera, it derives from Russian history as immortalized by a prior artistic creation, but where the latter is normally a work of literature, here it is a painting: Vasily Surikov's celebrated 19th-century canvas of a woman on a sled being transported against her will, ... She was Feodosiya Morozova, the aristocratic widow of a boyar and an Old Believer, a kind of real-life Marfa...."