The Ice Break is an English-language opera in three acts, with music and libretto to an original scenario by Sir Michael Tippett.
[1][2] One meaning of the opera's title is a reference to the actual physical breaking of ice on the frozen northern rivers, signaling the advent of spring.
John Warrack has noted that the work "confronts questions of stereotype on a wider scale" compared to Tippett's earlier operas, and also in a contemporary setting.
[7][3] Covent Garden revived the opera in the same year, but was not thereafter seen until a 1990 concert production at the Henry Wood Proms in the Royal Albert Hall in 1990.
[9] Prior to the action of the opera, Nadia had emigrated with her baby son, Yuri, after her husband, Lev, had been sentenced to the prison camps of Russia.
The opera opens in an airport lounge, where Lev, a Russian dissident, arrives to join his wife, Nadia, and his son, Yuri, in the West in exile after 20 years in prison.