The article offers a comparative analysis of two operas: Mikhail Glinka’s “A Life for the Tsar” and Uzeyir Hajibeyli’s “Koroglu.” Two intonational lines interact in each opera: one is bound up with monu­mentality and stasis, the other dampens the epic pathos by placing it within the context of the immediate flow of life. In Glinka, the counterpart to pathetic declarativeness is a genre-based, everyday intonationality linked to the wedding rite. In Hajibeyli, the counterweight to poster-like triumphalism is a pervasive rhythmic formula of a galloping horse. It lends the development extraordinary dynamism and strips any military feat of the status of invincibility. The monumental image of the people as the makers of history appears in both operas through the variety of their living responses to particular events—hence the genre-based multiplicity and dialogic nature of the choral scenes. A special dramaturgical role in these works belongs to lyric-dramatic intonationality. Lying behind the faсade of the verbal text’s one-dimensional rhetoric, it is precisely this intonationality that reflects the phenomenon of difficult, agonizing decisions, in all ages a marker of artistic truth.