 The story deals with the opposition of eternal forces of nature and involves the interactions of mythological characters (Frost, Spring, Wood-Sprite), real people (Kupava, Mizgir'), and those in-between, i.e., half-mythical, half-real (Snow Maiden, Lel’, Berendey).The composer strove to distinguish each group of characters musically, and several individual characters have their own associated leitmotifs.In addition to these distinctions, Rimsky-Korsakov characterized the townspeople particularly with folk melodies.