The composer's second operatic attempt was made with _Undine_. This work, submitted to the Director of the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg in 1869, was rejected, and the score mislaid by some careless official. When, after some years, it was discovered and returned to the composer, he put it in the fire without remorse. Neither of these immature efforts are worth serious consideration as affecting the development of Russian opera.
_The Oprichnik_ was begun in January 1870, and completed in April 1872. Tchaikovsky attacked this work in a complete change of spirit. This time his choice fell upon a purely national and historical subject. Lajechnikov's tragedy "The Oprichnik" is based upon an episode of the period of Ivan the Terrible, and possesses qualities which might well appeal to a composer of romantic proclivities. A picturesque setting; dramatic love and political intrigue; a series of effective--even sensational--situations, and finally several realistic pictures from national life; all these things might have been turned to excellent account in the hands of a skilled librettist. Unluckily the book was not well constructed, while, in order to comply with the demands of the Censor, the central figure of the tragedy--the tyrant himself--had to be reduced to a mere nonentity. The most serious error, however, was committed by Tchaikovsky himself, when he grafted upon _The Oprichnik_, with its crying need for national colour and special treatment, a portion of the pretty Italianised music of _The Voyevode_. The interpolation of half an act from a comedy subject into the libretto of an historical tragedy confused the action without doing much to relieve the lurid and sombre atmosphere of the piece.
The "Oprichniki," as we have already seen in Rubinstein's opera _The Bold Merchant Kalashnikov_, were the "Bloods" and dandies of the court of Ivan the Terrible--young noblemen of wild and dissolute habits who bound themselves together by sacrilegious vows to protect the tyrant and carry out his evil desires. Their unbridled insolence, the tales of their Black Masses and secret crimes, and their utter disrespect for age or sex, made them the terror of the populace. Sometimes they masqueraded in the dress of monks, but they were in reality robbers and murderers, hated and feared by the people whom they oppressed.
