About the work
Tatjana is an opera in three acts by Franz Lehár with a libretto by Felix Falzari and Max Kalbeck. It reworks Lehár's first completed opera, Kukuschka, which had premiered in Leipzig in 1896; under its new title, the piece opened in 1905 at the Deutsches Stadttheater in Brno.
Plot
The soldier Alexis falls in love with Tatjana, the daughter of a Volga fisherman, and defends her against a rival as well as against villagers who suspect her father of sorcery. Banished to Siberia after striking the village elder, Alexis is followed by Tatjana into the steppe, where both perish in a snowstorm.
Cultural significance
The libretto draws on the Siberian reportage of American journalist George Kennan. The reworked version attracted far more attention than the 1896 original and remains one of Lehár's rarely staged early operas.