Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden owes its birth to quite unusual circumstances. At the beginning of 1873, the Maly Theatre was closed for renovation, and its artists performed on the stage of the Bolshoi. The Moscow directorate of the Imperial Theatres decided to stage a performance which could have three troupes involved at once: opera, ballet and drama — and appealed to Ostrovsky with a request to create a new play. At the playwright’s personal wish, the music was commissioned from Tchaikovsky, who was already a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, but still a very young man then.

Ostrovsky was one of the composer’s favourite dramaturgs. Both Tchaikovsky’s first opera overture (The Storm) and his first opera (The Voyevoda) are associated with his plays. So, having received the order, Tchaikovsky enthusiastically set to work. “This is one of my favourite creations”, he later wrote to Nadezhda von Meck. “— It was a wonderful spring: my soul felt good, as always when summer and three months of freedom approached. I liked Ostrovsky’s play, and in three weeks I wrote the music effortlessly. It seems to me that in this music the joyful spring mood with which I was then imbued should be noticeable.”