My translation of Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri was first published in 1984 in the Russian Language Journal. I put it up on my first website in the late nineties, and since then it has been reproduced numerous times elsewhere on the web, both with my permission and without. During 2008-2010 it had three separate performances by people in three different countries who found it online and asked permission to perform it.
This response encouraged me to finally translate the other three “little tragedies” (the title is not Pushkin’s), which I did in 2009-2010. I also composed music for the two songs in Feast During the Plague. I am planning to publish all four as a book, along with my recent translation of the “Scene from Faust,” and probably also Rusalka. Together these constitute all of Pushkin’s shorter dramas.
Since online copies of Mozart and Salieri have appeared in various formats, some set as verse, some as prose, one even consisting of a solid text block without lineation or breaks of any kind, and since I’ve made a few revisions to the text, I am no longer providing an HTML version of the text here. A PDF with correct formatting, incorporating the latest changes, is available for downloading. It may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes. Those interested in performing the translation should request permission from me directly by email.
Mozart and Salieri performance history
March 12, 1984 – The Performance Network, Ann Arbor, Michigan (script-in-hand)
February 15-17, 2008 – Symphony Hall, Boston (pre-concert staged reading for each of three performances by the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra)
February 4-5, 2010 – The Space, London, UK (multimedia adaptation by El Pajarito theatre company)
March 26, 2010 – Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAE (fully staged)
poster shows originally scheduled performance date
The following video playlist shows the entire Mozart and Salieri sequence from the 1979 Soviet TV film Malenkie Tragedii (The Little Tragedies), dir. M. Shveitser, with subtitles adapted from my translation and inserted by myself. There are five segments, totalling approximately 34 minutes.