Cesar Cui - A Feast in Time of Plague

Картинка из Википедии

Things are sometimes not what you would think.  For example, you might think that a composer with the name "Caesar Cui" was Italian, or maybe French.  You wouldn't think that he was a Russian Army engineer, much less a full General who taught fortifications in the Imperial Military Academy and who wrote textbooks on the subject.

But today he is best known for his other life, the one in music.  As a child he received a first rate education which of course included the study music.  It turned out that he was gifted, and was writing piano pieces by the time he was 14.  While his day job no doubt kept him busy, he wrote a lot of music, most of which was based on Russian themes.

This piece is from his opera based on Alexander Pushkin's poem of the same name.  Originally performed in 1901, it was more or less forgotten until 1999, when the Tchaikovsky Opera revived it for the Pushkin bicentennial. In 2009 it premiered on these shores.

You might think that this was pretty obscure, but at the time he was a big deal.  He was one of "The Five", along with Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin - basically, Russia's musical Hall Of Fame.  He is buried with the other members of The Five at  the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, Saint Petersburg.