In the original Danish play, the spelling of the princess's name was "Iolanthe", later adopted for the otherwise unrelated Gilbert and Sullivan operetta of that name.

Composing upon the completion of The Queen of Spades, Tchaikovsky worried that he had lost his creative inspiration after such a large project.

He started Iolanta in June 1891 with the central duet, and, despite his worries, finished composition in September and orchestration in November.

The public reception was quite favorable, though Tchaikovsky was disappointed and felt he was repeating himself, especially when compared to his earlier work, The Enchantress.

[5] In 2015, Iolanta was performed for the first time at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, with Anna Netrebko in the title role.

The blind singer Nafset Chenib (headliner of the 2014 Winter Paralympics closing ceremony [7][8]) performed in the title role in the Ivangorod Fortress on 29 August 2021.

[9][10] The instrumentation requires the following forces:[11] Time: 15th century Place: Mountains of southern France Princess Iolanta has been blind from birth.

She lives in a beautiful enclosed garden on the king's estate, secluded from the world, in the care of Bertrand and Martha.

Ibn-Hakia sings the monologue "Two worlds", explaining the interdependence of the mind and the body within the divinely ordained universe, which merges spirit and matter.

Vaudémont finds the entrance to Iolanta's secret garden, ignoring the sign which threatens death to anyone who enters.

Iolanta awakens and Vaudémont, who asks her to give him a red rose as a keepsake, realizes she is blind when she twice offers him a white one.

After Vaudémont admits seeing the warning sign at the garden entrance, the furious king threatens to execute him for revealing the truth to Iolanta.