Trivia / The Snow Maiden

• Creator's Favorite Episode: Rimsky-Korsakov had composed fifteen operas, but The Snow Maiden was his personal favorite.
• Creator's Oddball: Ostrovsky was already an established author of firmly realistic satirical plays, and then suddenly out came a strange symbolic fantasy. Needless to say, it was received very coldly. He only wrote one other fantasy play years later, but that one is little-known now.
• Dawson Casting: The Snow Maiden is fifteen. Obviously, she is never played by an actress of that age (except in high-school adaptations and suchlike where the plot is usually watered down anyway), especially in the opera where her role is a pretty demanding one for a coloratura soprano.
• Descended Creator: Pavel Kadochnikov both directed the 1968 movie and played Tsar Berendey in it.
• Follow the Leader: Defied by the 1968 movie. While Rimsky-Korsakov's opera and, to a lesser extent, Tchaikovsky's incidental music are considered the defining musical versions of the story and even the productions of the play generally use one or the other, the 1968 film uses neither and contains entirely original music. Some reviewers have noted that the composer, it seems, purposefully strove for a mood completely opposite to that of Rimsky-Korsakov.