During his time at the Moscow Conservatoire, around September 1866 the school's principal, Nikolay Rubinstein commissioned Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to compose a Festival Overture on the Danish National Anthem to be played for the visit of the Tsarevich (heir to the throne) to Moscow, accompanied by his new Danish bride, Princess Dagmar of Denmark.
He imprisons his pregnant wife, Farida, in a windowless room at the top of the tallest tower in the palace, and when she dies in childbirth he orders that his son, the Czarevich Safa, should never leave the room.
Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia | Tsarevich | Alexei Petrovich, Tsarevich of Russia |
When the Tsarevich runs away with Sonja he believes that she is a boy adding what Richard Traubner of Opera News called an "underlying homosexual frisson" to the operetta.
Moreover, all vessels constructed at Tsarevich-Dmitriev were destroyed (the vessels were constructed in a shipyard founded by a boyar named Afanasy Ordin-Nashchokin).