The Mazepa entry is brief, but unusually precise about its points of interest. It identifies Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as the composer, Aleksandr Pushkin’s narrative poem Poltava as the literary source, baritone Pavel Lisitsian in the title role, and Renata Babak as Liubov. It also places Taras Shevchenko’s painting Maria beside the operatic material. These links—opera, poetry, performer and image—make the page a compact map of the collection’s larger method.
From Poltava to the operatic stage
Mazepa is a historical opera shaped around private lives caught in public catastrophe. Rather than offering a synopsis, this page concentrates on its literary lineage: Tchaikovsky’s opera drew on Pushkin’s Poltava. That relationship matters because the collection repeatedly follows words as they move into music. On other pages, poetry becomes art song; here a narrative poem becomes a large dramatic score.
The title itself appears in both scripts as Мазепа and Mazepa. Tchaikovsky’s name is retained in the familiar English form, while the Russian literary source is identified without allowing the discussion to drift away from the opera. The aim is not to retell the historical figure’s entire life, but to show how words, music and visual art meet around this work.
The performers named here
The page records Pavel Lisitsian as Mazepa and associates his performance with Mazepa’s arioso. It records Renata Babak as Liubov. No date, venue or production is supplied for either item, so none is added. That restraint is important: a role attribution is useful on its own, while an unsupported venue or year would turn a catalogue entry into a false performance history.
Babak’s broader documented repertory can be followed on the role catalogue, where the Countess in The Queen of Spades, Marfa in Khovanshchina, Ratmir in Ruslan and Lyudmila, Carmen, Santuzza and other roles appear. Lisitsian belongs here because the catalogue identifies him specifically with the title role of Mazepa.
Shevchenko’s Maria
The page also named a work by Тарас Шевченко / Taras Shevchenko: Maria, dated 1840 and described as a picture based on Pushkin’s Poltava. In the collection, that artwork creates a second route into the poem. It is not stage scenery and is not presented as an illustration commissioned for Tchaikovsky’s opera. Instead, it shows how the same literary source could be read through another art form decades before the opera.
Maria belongs to a much larger list on the Shevchenko art page, alongside Katerina, Gypsy Fortune-Teller, Dying Gladiator, Narcissus and Nymph Echo, portraits, landscapes and literary illustrations. That page also explains why Shevchenko’s poetry occupies an important place in Ukrainian vocal repertory.
A route toward older Ukrainian song
The collection associates Mazepa not only with the opera but also with a route into Ukrainian baroque song. The subjects remain distinct and are connected clearly. The opera belongs here; the older historical song about Hetman Petro Doroshenko has its own page. That song is treated as repertory transmitted through words and melody, not as an appendix to Tchaikovsky’s work.
Readers comparing forms may also continue to Lysenko’s Taras Bulba, another historical opera represented in the collection, or to the written repertoire index, which brings the named composers, roles and performers into a single view.
Further reference: A general account of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky provides context for the composer. This page’s performance attributions remain limited to the Orpheus and Lyra record.