Bill Cooper/Royal Opera House
A vain, capricious girl sends her lunk of a suitor on a quest for the best ruby slippers in the world, while said lunk's mother, the village witch, cosies up to the Devil. It's a whimsical Christmas Eve tale, exuberantly narrated by Nikolay Gogol in his Ukrainian-based Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka; but you wouldn't think there would be much room for pathos and sentiment. Trust Tchaikovsky to favour the heartfelt and the melancholy in his very characteristic early opera Vakula the Smith, revised at the height of his powers as what the Royal Opera - appealing, perhaps, to dangerous renascent Russian pride in the Romanovs - calls The Tsarina's Slippers.