Kubla Khan

A dream. A fragment. A work of music.

In 1797, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s own account, reading about Xanadu — the summer residence of Kublai Khan — led into an extraordinary dream. He had taken opium as medicine and, in sleep, imagined a poem of some two or three hundred lines.

A pleasure-dome, a sacred river, underground caverns, a chasm, war and distant music filled the vision. On waking, he began to write. An unexpected visitor interrupted him; by the time he returned, much of the dream had vanished. Fifty-four lines survived, later published as Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.

Koroletski’s Kubla Khan sets the complete surviving text across four continuous musical chapters. Quiet piano passages and blues motifs give way to powerful rock sections that dissolve into psychedelic chaos. The changing musical forms become a single progressive psychedelic art-rock journey.

The work does not attempt to complete the missing lines or reconstruct Coleridge’s dream. It creates a new space for the words that survived, turning an unfinished poetic vision into a complete musical work.