In 1891, when Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky returned to St. Petersburg to rest after conducting his own moody music during a tour of Europe, he was requested to write something for the Imperial Theatres. With his brother Modeste as librettist, weary Piotr Ilyitch sat down and produced his last opera, lolanthe, a little idyll about a princess of Naples who did not know she was blind because she had been so from birth. Cured by Ibn Hakia, who strokes the long white beard appropriate to a Moorish sage, she marries the noble whose...
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