A Feast in Time of Plague (Cui opera)

A Feast in Time of Plague (Пир во время чумы in Cyrillic, Pir vo vremya chumy in English transliteration) is an opera (literally labeled "dramatic scenes") in one act by César Cui, composed in 1900.

Although it never became part of the standard repertory, Feast was revived by the Tchaikovsky Opera in Perm, Russia in 1999 as part of a Pushkin-bicentennial performance of all four of the operatic settings of the Little Tragedies, i.e., Dargomyzhsky's The Stone Guest, Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri, and Rachmaninoff's The Miserly Knight.

Feast was given its American premiere on October 14, 2009 by the Little Opera Theatre of New York, directed by Philip Shneidman.

A CD recording of Feast was issued on the Chandos label in 2004, with the Russian State Symphony Orchestra under Valery Polyansky.

In the midst of a feast, a Young Man calls for everyone to remember and raise a toast to one of their friends who recently died from the plague.

When Walsingham finishes singing his hymn, the Priest enters, chastises the merrymakers for disrespecting the dead, and begs them to leave.

Словарь опер впервые поставленных или изданных в дореволюционной России и в СССР, 1736-1959 [Dictionary of Operas First Performed or Published in Pre-Revolutionary Russia and in the USSR, 1836-1959] (Москва: Советский композитор, 1962), pp. 227.