Mavra is a one-act comic opera based on Alexander Pushkin's story The Little House in Kolomna. The opera was written shortly after Stravinsky's orchestration of Tchaikovsky's music for a revival of The Sleeping Beauty; the resulting work shows Tchaikovsky's influence, most notably in its deep connection to the Russian folk tradition (Stravinsky insisted that Tchaikovsky was a true Russian composer, with an "unconscious" link to "the true popular sources" of the Slavic race).

Mavra's libretto was written by Boris Kochno, secretary to Stravinsky collaborator and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. The plot of the opera is quite simple: Parasha, daughter of a middle class family, and Basil, a young hussar, fall in love. In order to be together, Parasha dresses Basil in women's clothes and brings him into the household as the family's new cook, Mavra; the mother's discovery of "her" shaving leads to a comical dissolution of the ruse. The premiere of Mavra was given on June 3, 1922 under Gregor Fitelburg at the Paris Opera, and it has only seldom been revived since.

The opera consists of thirteen formal numbers, connected by spoken dialogue. Musically, the work is something of a throwback to the idiom of early Stravinsky stage works like Le Rossignol and Renard, although in purely instrumental terms it bears some traces of the neo-classical sound Stravinksky had recently explored in his ballet Pulcinella, completed not long before. It also glances in the direction of Tchaikovsky and Glinka in certain spots, but Mavra's lightly applied motor rhythms and comical bursts of polytonal scoring clearly place the work in the twentieth-century. At the time, Stravinsky was at a crossroads with his Russian "primitivist" vein, given the protracted genesis of Les noces and his desire to expore neo-classic concepts with more depth, a style that seemed more fresh and new to him in 1922 than that of Le Sacre du Printemps. Despite the relative lack of success that greeted it at its Paris premiere, Mavra remained one of Stravinsky's favorites among his own works, and at one time Stravinsky commented that he thought it was the best thing he had ever done.





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