About the work
An opera by Georges Bizet to a libretto by François-Hippolyte Leroy and Henri Trianon, composed around 1862–1865 with the Paris Opéra in mind. As neither the Théâtre Lyrique nor the Opéra accepted the work, it remained unperformed in Bizet's lifetime, and the score, believed lost, resurfaced only in 1929. Its stage premiere, in a shortened version revised by Henri Büsser, took place on 12 October 1951 at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux.
Plot
Tsar Ivan IV has Marie, a Circassian princess abducted by Russian soldiers, brought to his court and makes her his wife against her will. Her brother Igor, chosen by lot to assassinate the tsar, attempts to kill him on their wedding night but is discovered; once the conspiracy is exposed and Ivan recovers from a fit of madness, the opera ends with the couple's reconciliation.
Cultural significance
Bizet later reused some musical ideas from the unperformed score, among other places in his piano suite Jeux d'enfants; only a modern edition completed by Howard Williams made the long-lost work regularly performable.