Руслан и Людмила
In "Askold's Grave", the musical characterization of such personages as Vseslav or his fiancée Nadezhda belong to the sphere of sentiment romance. The style of chorus writing is near to Russian folk music. The role of Varangian Frelaf is comic and forestalls the character of Farlaf in Glinka’s "Ruslan and Ludmila". The part of Neizvestnyi (the Unknown Man) is written for the voice (bass) of a very wide range and often a high tessitura. It contains some virtuoso passages and incredibly big intervallic leaps, like the major tenth in the second bar of the following example: