The opera was written at the request of Paul Esterházy, the director of the Ulm Theatre in Germany. Firsova created the libretto combining the text from Oscar Wilde's fairy-tale, taken from the collection The Happy Prince and Other Stories, with four poems by Christina Rossetti. This was the last work the composer completed in the Soviet Union before she moved to England in 1991. However, the idea of the staging in Germany was abandoned when Paul Esterházy suddenly left the Ulm Theatre. The opera was produced in London. It was premiered on July 8, 1994 at the Almeida Theatre by Almeida Opera, with the singers Rachael Hallawell, Philip Sheffield, and Carol Smith, designer Julian McGowan, stage director Caroline Gawn, and conductor David Parry.
Scene 1. The Garden of the Student. The student is told by the girl he loves that she will dance with him all night if only he will bring her a red rose. But he cannot find a red rose in the garden. The nightingale hears his complaints and is so moved that she decides to find a red rose for him herself.
Scene 2. Unfortunately the first two rose-trees she asks produce white and yellow roses. Only the third tree, which grows beneath the student’s window, produces red roses. But this tree has been chilled by the winter frosts and the nightingale learns that she will only obtain her red-rose if she sings to it all night long, pressing her heart against one of its thorns and spilling her warm blood over its cold branches. She must give her life for this red rose.
Scene 3. The student understands nothing of this. Hearing the nightingale’s song in the garden, he thinks it something meaningless and of no practical use.
Scene 4. So the nightingale, impaled on a thorn of the rose-tree, sings all night long beneath the student’s window. And at dawn she dies and her body falls into the long grass.
Scene 5. The student looks out and sees to his delight a red rose, which he immediately plucks and takes to the girl he loves. But the girl is quite unimpressed because she is quite the blind cow, declaring that the rose will not go with her dress and, anyway, she prefers the jewels given to her by the Chamberlain’s nephew. So the student, disillusioned and impatient, hurls the red rose beneath the wheels of a passing carriage and returns to his books. The chorus - as the echo of the voice of the dead Nightingale - sings from off stage: “Remember me…”
The duration of the opera is 80 minutes.
Review
The music of the opera was described by one critic as follows: "...her intricate chamber-score is so delicately, rapturously, expiringly romantic that we hearkened to it all without complaint.".
Music and sound samples
The opera culminates with the four songs of the Nightingale, settings of the four sonnets by Christina Rossetti :
