Although this composer's output was quite small, it seems incredible once you consider that music wasn't his primary profession.

Composition was a side-career, done when he wasn't busy as a researcher and professor of chemistry.

Understandably, then, his larger works took a great deal of time to complete. This selection was his only fully worked-out opera.

At the time of his death, he had been working on it for nearly twenty years, and still it wasn't quite finished.

Famous for its ethnic dances, the opera is set during the medieval period in which the growing Russian empire battled a nomadic Central Asian tribe…