CHAPTER 10

Ital’yanshchina

EARLY EXPOSURE

During the night of 11/12 March 1801 (Old Style), Tsar Paul I of Russia was strangled in his bed by members of his retinue, acting either under orders or with the consent of the heir apparent, who would reign gloriously for a quarter century as Alexander I. Shortly thereafter, Paul’s protégé, Giuseppe Sarti, the last in the brilliant line of Italians who served as musical directors to the imperial court and chapel in the eighteenth century, left Russia and was not replaced. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russia was all at once without a court Italian opera theater. It would take almost half a century before Italian opera would regain its mandate.

Early in Alexander’s reign, in 1803, the public theaters of Russia were reorganized under a crown monopoly that lasted until 1882. Theatrical enterprises could no longer be undertaken as private speculations. All theaters became the property of the crown and were directly administered by the government. In St. Petersburg the official chain of command went from the autocrat through the governor-general of the city to a steering committee that oversaw the daily operation of the theaters and decided matters of repertory and personnel. As part of this reorganization, four public theaters were established in St. Petersburg. Tsar Alexander had already concluded a contract with Antonio Casassi, a dancer who had been working in Russia since 1780 and who had since 1792 been custodian of the Imperial Theaters under Catherine the Great, to form an Italian opera troupe for the capital, for which a new house—the Novïy malïy teatr (New Little Theater)—was constructed on the Nevsky Prospect. In 1803 the building was purchased by the government, and Casassi’s troupe nationalized as one of the four theaters created under the new plan. The three other theaters—Russian, French, and German—presented spoken plays as well as musical ones; the Italian theater alone was to be reserved for operas. Named as its musical director was the Venetian Catterino Cavos (1776-1840), who had been on the staff of the Imperial Theaters since 1798, and who was also put in charge of opera and ballet spectacles at the Bolshoy kamenniy teatr (Great Stone Theater), the Russian-language house. The Novïy malïy repertoire consisted exclusively of opera buffa, mostly revivals from the court theater of Catherine the Great, and by “her” composers (Paisiello, Martin y Soler, Cimarosa; works of Salieri and Portogallo were also performed.)¹

Casassi’s superannuated enterprise lasted only until 1807; of all types of spectacle, Italian opera at this, one of its historic low points, had the least to offer the newly emergent Russian urban paying public. All the other theaters, by contrast, were flourishing, and musical plays were in every case the main attraction. Most fashionable by far was the French company, which performed for the public at the Bolshoy kamennïy, and for the court at the Hermitage and at Peterhof, the Tsar’s retreat. Their repertoire—opéras comiques, rescue operas, vaudevilles by Dalayrac, Grétry, Isouard, Méhul, Catel, and Cherubini (and one Russian, Alexey Nikolayevich Titov)—was fresh and exciting, and there were two stars at the helm: François-Adrien Boieldieu, who in seven years as musical director (1804-11) presented the Russian public with some dozen premières of his own; and Charles Louis Didelot, who choreographed the ballets, for which a veritable craze developed. (Daniel Steibelt was also associated with the French opera from 1808, and stayed on in St. Petersburg until his death fifteen years later.) There was also a popular French theater in Moscow, as every reader of War and Peace will recall. And the same reader will not need to be reminded that French opera in Russia came to a sudden halt with the Patriotic War of 1812, and was never revived. (The last production in St. Petersburg had been Spontini’s La Vestale, which opened on 13 January 1811, just three years after its Paris première.)

Between 1812 and 1829 operas were given in St. Petersburg only in Russian and German. This did not mean that the French and Italian repertories were altogether neglected. It was the German company, for example, that first introduced Russian audiences to Rossini (Tancredi, 1817). The Russian opera also presented Rossini in translation, along with works by Paer and Fioravanti. The Russian-language production of Don Giovanni in 1828 (with the title role transposed for the tenor Vasiliy Samoylov) was a direct stimulus on Pushkin’s “little tragedy,” The Stone Guest (1830), later set to music by Dargomïzhsky.

A word about Cavos: from the time of his appointment as music director at the Bolshoy kamennïy he cast his lot totally with the Russian opera so far as composition was concerned, and wrote all his mature operas to Russian librettos, many by Prince Alexander Shakhovskoy, a popular playwright of the time, who was also the éminence grise on the Imperial Theaters Committee. (Cavos also collaborated with Didelot on a number of French-style ballets after the latter’s return to Russia in 1816.) Thus despite his nationality Cavos does not properly figure in the history of Italian opera at all, even in Russia.

THE EARLIEST more or less continuous Italian opera enterprise in nineteenth-century Russia was based in neither capital but in the Black Sea port city of Odessa, where a state theater for opera and ballet was opened in 1809. In that year a small troupe of Italian singers and dancers led by an impresario named Montavani, featuring the celebrated buffo cantante Luigi Zamboni (1767—1837, the very one who would later create Rossini’s Figaro) and his daughter Gustavina as prima donna, appeared in the city and began giving performances of opera buffa. They were officially engaged for the new theater beginning the next season, and returned regularly (except for the plague year 1812-13) until 1820, when they were lured to Moscow.² From 1821, Italian opera in Odessa was managed by Luigi Buonavoglia, whose chief claim to fame was having written the libretto for Paer’s Agnese di Fitz-Henry (1809), one of the most popular operas of the period. It naturally figured in his first Odessa season (the next year it would be performed in the capital in Russian translation). Among the artists in Buonavoglia’s roster was Adelina Catalani, sister-in-law of the world-renowned Angelica.³ During his year of exile in Odessa (1823-24) Pushkin was an enthusiastic fan of Buonavoglia’s company (“In the evenings I don’t go anywhere except to the theater,” he wrote a friend),⁴ and recalled what he encountered there for the first time in a supplement (“Fragments of ‘Onegin’s Journey’“) that did not make it into the definitive text of Eugene Onegin:

No uzh temneyet vecher siniy,

Pora nam v Operu skorey:

Tarn upoitel’nïy Rossini,

Yevropi baloven—Orfey.

Ne vnemlya kritike surovoy,

On vechno tot zhe, vechno novoy,

On zvuki l’yot—oni kipyat,

Oni tekut, oni goryat,

Kak potselui molodiye,

Vsyo v nege, v plameni lyubvi,

Kak zashipevshego Ai

Struya i brizgi zolotïye . . .

No, gospoda, pozvoleno l’

S vinom ravnyat’ do-re-mi-sol?

But the blue evening grows already darker.

Time to the opera we sped:

There, ‘tis the ravishing Rossini,

Darling of Europe, Orpheus.

To severe criticism not harking, he

Is ever selfsame, ever new;

He pours out melodies, they effervesce,

They flow, they burn

Like youthful kisses, all

In mollitude, in flames of love,

Like the stream and the golden spurtles of Ay

Starting to fizz; but, gentlemen,

Is it permitted to compare

Do-re-mi-sol to wine?⁵

By the end of Pushkin’s stay, at least eight Rossini operas had been performed in Odessa—and pretty skimpily, the great poet’s enthusiasm notwithstanding. In 1820, the roster of the theater orchestra had been raised (!) to sixteen. Only at the end of Pushkin’s season did Buonavoglia manage to increase it again, to twenty-four.⁶ As for the singing, one disgruntled melomane compared the troupe to “a nomadic tribe who, having been around to all the provincial stages [of Italy], to Bologna, Siena, Ferrara and elsewhere, is finally bringing its worn-out talents our way.”⁷ Perhaps the nadir was reached in December 1827, with Don Giovanni, a disastrous one-night stand.⁸ By 1830, despite a number of bankruptcies and a whole series of new managers,⁹ standards would be much improved (to judge by the same witness). The number of Rossini operas in active repertory would reach thirteen. New productions of Rossini would continue over the next decade, although from 1830 first Donizetti and then Bellini would come to dominate the repertoire.

The Odessa Italian opera reached its peak in the season 1844-45, when Luigi Ricci took over the theater, introducing the works of Verdi (beginning with / Lombardi), and bringing with him some first-class singing talent, though as usual with provincial houses, it was talent either past its prime—for example, Giuseppina Ronzi de Begnis—or before it. Into the latter category fell the twins Franziska (Fanny) and Ludmilla (Lidia) Stolz, the elder sisters of the great Verdian soprano Teresa Stolz, with whom Ricci shared à notorious ménage à trois that led to his dismissal. (His operas, however, stayed in the repertory.) Another high point came in May 1851 with the appearance (as Norma) of Teresa Brambilla, two months after she had created the role of Gilda in Rigoletto. By this time there were thirty-five musicians in the pit.¹⁰ The solo flautist was Antonio Sacchetti, whose son Liberio (1852-1916) would occupy the chair in music history and aesthetics at the St. Petersburg Conservatory for many years.

The Italian opera at Odessa, the longest-lasting if least remembered public enterprise of its kind in Russia, was a casualty of the Crimean War. It closed its doors for the last time in 1855.

“AND IS IT TRUE,” wrote Pushkin from Odessa to his friend and fellow poet Anton Delvig in St. Petersburg, “that Rossini and Italian opera are coming where you are? My God! They are the representatives of heavenly paradise. I’ll die of longing and envy.”¹¹

No, they were not coming just yet. Before taking on the capital, Zamboni and Co. (in reconstituted and much improved vocal shape) stopped off in Moscow, under the auspices of the old capital’s loftily aristocratic Society of Music Lovers (Obshchestvo liubiteley muzïki; its directors included the Princes Yusupov, Dolgorukiy, and Golitsin), which subsidized their appearances with a public stock issue. (What made it legal was the Tsar’s own participation; Alexander bought ten shares and threw in an additional subsidy of 30,000 rubles per annum.)¹² They opened at Apraksin’s Theater the evening of 12 November 1821 with Il Turco in Italia, the first Rossini ever to reach Muscovite ears. Though it developed a cult following among the fashionable, the Italian theater in Moscow never managed to turn a profit. It held on for only six seasons, until May 1827.

Our principal witness to the impression it made is Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky (1804-69), then at the very beginning of a distinguished literary career. (Like the poet and playwright Griboyedov, his contemporary, Odoyevsky was a dilettante composer as well.) His was the minority viewpoint—that of the Hoffmannesque or “Mozartean” opposition to the “Rossinists.” Summing up the Italians’ third Moscow season (1823-24), Odoyevsky listed their pros and cons from the frankly idealistic, Germanophile vantage point that was typical of literary Russians of the period (Pushkin, the greatest of literary Russians, was here as ever atypical):

One has to admire the Italian singers’ artistry, their enviable flexibility of voice, likewise the all-around presentableness of the Italian enterprise, which affords the Muscovite educated class one of its favorite pleasures. For the sake of all this it might be possible to forgive the theater’s excessive attachment to Rossini. But will our descendents (for whom alone we labor, as has been said) believe us when we say that in all the four years of the troupe’s presence in our midst not a single Mozart opera has been given at the Italian theater!¹³

As if to mollify their critics, Zamboni and Co. did put on Don Giovanni the very next year (31 January 1825) as a bénéfice for their prima donna, Luigia Anti (1800-1837). The production had its drawbacks; the title role was sung (as was then usual) by a tenor, with consequent damage to ensembles. But the veteran director’s Leporello filled Odoyevsky with delight, allowing him the hope that “in our great city Don Giovanni were the turning point in that disease known as Rossinism.”¹⁴

The disease having died out in Moscow of its own accord, the Italians continued northward to the imperial city, whither they were summoned by Count Matvey Wielhorski, St. Petersburg’s leading musical patron. They opened with Rossini (Il barbiere and Cenerentola) at the Bolshoy kamennïy during the winter of 1828; their first full season in the capital would commence on 17 January of the next year. The troupe continued to feature their director, Zamboni, now aged sixty-one but still “the best of all his kind” in the words of Alexander Ivanovich Vol’f, the great chronicler of the St. Petersburg stage, “thanks to whom Rossini’s comic operas pleased the melomanes even more than the rest” of the repertoire.¹⁵ Another veteran of the Moscow campaign was the bass Domenico Tosi (d. 1848), who would spend the rest of his life in St. Petersburg, eventually joining the Russian opera troupe and (with legendary ineptitude) creating the role of Farlaf in Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. Glinka himself, then in his twenties, was very friendly with the Italian artists during their St. Petersburg engagement, and in 1828 apprenticed himself for a while to Leopoldo Zamboni, the director’s son, who was acting as the group’s principal coach.¹⁶ Among the newly engaged singers was the dramatic soprano Sophie Schoberlechner (1807-64), Russian-born daughter of Filippo Dall’Occa, a Bolognese musician (pianist and cellist) and voice teacher long resident in St. Petersburg. Her husband, the Austrian composer Franz Schoberlechner, composed a vehicle for her appearances in the Russian capital (Il Disertore per I’Amore), which was duly performed during the troupe’s second St. Petersburg season.

There would be only three such seasons. Despite a massive dose of contagion (eighteen different Rossini operas; eleven in 1829 alone) and despite year-round exposure (with summer seasons at the resort of Kamennïy Os-trov), the disease Odoyevsky sought to cure with Mozart never infected St. Petersburg at all. The Italian opera “failed to attract a large public or arouse the slightest enthusiasm,” in the measured words of Vol’f, who placed the blame squarely on the performers. “Italian opera cannot withstand mediocrity; experience has proved this.”¹⁷ During the season 1830-31, Vol’f recorded, “the deficit mounted and mounted, until maintaining the costly troupe became impossible.”¹⁸ For the next dozen years neither Russian capital would hear any opera in Italian.

Even in translation, Italian opera fared poorly. A few rustic and sentimental perennials held the boards—notably Fioravanti’s Le Cantatrici villane (Derevenskiye pevitsï in Russian) and Paer’s Agnese (Otets i doch’, after its subtitle, “II Padre e la Figlia”), without both of which, it seemed, no St. Petersburg season was complete—but novelties tended, as before, to be French. The Rossini repertoire reverted to those few standards that had been introduced in Russian before the Italian visit. Vol’f echoed in retrospect the Schadenfreude many were feeling at the time: “Our singers, ready for anything, set pluckily to making up their fiorituras under Cavos’s guidance, nor did they fall on their faces; Rossini’s Cenerentola and Derevenskiye pevitsï were heard with great pleasure, and nobody missed the far more artful renditions of the Italians.”¹⁹ Osip Petrov, the great Russian bass, then at the beginning of his career, was found a worthy, even a surpassing replacement for Zamboni in the basso-buffo roles.

ONSET

Another reorganization of the Imperial Theaters took place in 1829, reflecting the character of Tsar Nikolai I (reigned 1825-55), Alexander’s younger brother, who, in the words of a prominent historian, “often bypassed regular channels, and . . . generally resented formal deliberation, consultation, or other procedural delay.”²⁰ According to an ukase issued on 29 April, the cumbersome Imperial Theaters Committee was abolished. Its duties and powers were now concentrated in the office of a single Intendant of the Imperial Theaters, who reported directly to the Minister of the Imperial Household.²¹ In effect, this placed the Imperial Theaters under the direct personal control of the Tsar, and under the financial control of the autocrat’s personal exchequer. Questions of budget, repertoire, and personnel were subject to the Tsar’s personal review; it was a prerogative Nikolai and his successors took seriously and exercised energetically. All questions of ordinary censorship aside, no theatrical work could see production without the Tsar’s personal approval and implicit (often active) cooperation. It was something no critic could afford to forget. Nor could composers: Alexander Dargomïzhsky chose the subject of his first opera (Esmeralda, after Hugo) only after being persuaded by his friend Vasiliy Zhukovsky (not only a great poet but also a government censor) that his first choice, Lucrezia Borgia, could never be produced in Russia.²²

Nikolai’s ordinary censorship, meanwhile, was of a spectacular strictness. His accession having been opposed by an attempted palace coup in favor of his brother Konstantin (the so-called Decembrist revolt), Nikolai lost no time in instituting controls that almost rivaled the insanely repressive policies of his father, Paul. Among them was an immediate edict (promulgated 14 December 1825) that banned all “rescue operas” of the kind popularized in revolutionary France, and all operas with overtly antityrannical plots. Even La Clemenza di Tito, proposed for production in 1826 (possibly as a veiled hint to Nikolai to deal leniently with the Decembrists), was banned.²³ In addition, all operas with biblical plots were prohibited in keeping with the Orthodox Church’s strictures against the secular depiction of religious themes, a ban that extended even to the inclusion of ecclesiastics (of any denomination) among the cast of characters. Thus Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto, first performed in Russia in 1829, had to be disguised as Pietro l’Eremita, as it had been some years before in London. (When the expanded French version, sung in Italian, reached the Russian capital in 1853, it was in the guise of Zorà, again following London.) After 1848 restrictions became tighter yet: even when sung by Russian singers (i.e., in individual scenes or arias at benefit performances), some operas (Lombardi, Ernani) could be performed only in the original language²⁴—a restriction reminiscent of that which until recently controlled the concert performance of sacred music in the USSR. The Nikolayan censorship outlasted Nikolai. Les Vêpres Siciliennes, as in Italy, was given in Russia (from 1857) as Giovanna de Guzman. (An incidental mark of the favored treatment accorded La Forza del destino on its world première in St. Petersburg in 1862 would be the fact that, by special—and precedent-setting—dispensation, its Franciscans, Padre Guardiano and Fra Melitone, would be undisguised.)

Few of the alterations mentioned thus far were uniquely imposed in Russia; censorship was a fact of theatrical life throughout Europe. That Nikolai’s censorship was still and all the strictest may be seen in the case of Guillaume Tell—a touchy subject everywhere but France, but nowhere as touchy as in St. Petersburg. An alternative libretto, by J. R. Planché, had been prepared for London and afterward also used in Berlin and elsewhere. It was called Andreas Hofer, after the leader of the Tyrolean resistance to Napoleon. Yet even Hofer, despite his devotion to the Austrian Emperor, struck Nikolai as a dangerous example (and the events depicted too recent). A new libretto, set in the distant and innocuous fifteenth century, had to be concocted just for Russia by Rafaíl Mikhailovich Zotov, the head of repertory for the Imperial Theaters: drawing on Walter Scott’s then-recent Anne of Geierstein, Zotov came up with Karl Smelïy (“Charles the Bold”), under which title the opera was given its St. Petersburg première in 18 36.²⁵ Later, when the opera would be performed in Italian, Zotov’s translated libretto (Carlo il Temerario) remained de rigueur. Thus such notorious Soviet adaptations as that by which Nikolai’s favorite Russian Opera, A Life for the Tsar, was cleansed of its Tsarism had ample Tsarist, indeed Nikolayan, precedent.

Another Nikolaian ukase, issued two years earlier, had established a schedule of payments for theatrical authors and artists. Works were divided for purposes of emolument into five categories, as follows:

1.original tragedies and comedies in verse in five or four acts, or the music of “large operas” (4,000 rubles or 1/10 of receipts, whichever was greater)

2.original tragedies and comedies in verse in three acts, or prose plays in three or four acts, translations of tragedies and comedies in verse in five or four acts, or the music of “medium-sized operas” (2,500 rubles or 1/15 of receipts)

3.original comedies, tragedies, and dramas in verse in two acts or one, or in prose in three acts, translations of tragedies and comedies in verse in three acts, original vaudevilles in three acts, or the music of “small operas” (2,000 rubles or 1/20 of receipts)

4.original dramas or comedies in prose in two acts, translated dramas or comedies in verse in two acts or one, translations of excellent dramas in three or two acts, original vaudevilles in two acts or one (1,000 rubles or 1/30 of receipts)

5.translated vaudevilles and brief prose plays (by arrangement, not to exceed 500 rubles).²⁶

These terms are of significance in the present context chiefly because they did not apply to foreign authors, nor were visiting artists’ fees subject to the ordinary pay scale of the Imperial Theaters.

HISTORIANS of the Russian operatic stage now agree that the turning point for Italian opera in Russia came in January 1836—ironically enough, the same year (though not the same “season”) as the première (in November) of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, which laid the cornerstone for the development of a Russian national operatic school. Between that cornerstone and that development there would be a long wait; by contrast, the repercussions of the banner year for Italian opera were immediate. It was Semiramide, Rossini’s last Italian opera and his most heroic, chosen by Cavos for his own bénéfice against the wishes of the Imperial Theaters Directorate,²⁷ and with his protégée Anna Vorob’yova (1816-1901) in the trousers role of Arsace, that tipped the scales for Italy. Vorob’yova had a fantastic personal success, the production turned an unheard-of profit, and it finally aroused a loyal following for Italian opera on the part of a public that had spurned the same repertoire in native renditions only a few years before. Nikolai Gogol, who happened to spend the year in the capital and wrote a theatrical diary, was among those amazed: “Semiramide, to which the public has been indifferent for the past five years [i.e., since Zamboni’s troupe had last presented it], all at once enraptures the same public now that Rossini’s music has become virtually an anachronism.”²⁸

In the wake of this epochal production, the tide began to turn at last away from the French repertoire and toward the Italian when it came to selecting novelties for the Russian opera (and for its surviving rival, the German) to produce. In 1836-37, besides A Life for the Tsar there were five new productions in the two houses combined. Of these, four were Italian. In 1838-39 it was four out of six; in 1839-40, five out of eight; 1840-41 (Russian figures only), three out of four. Beginning the next season, the Donizetti craze belatedly hit the Russian capital, and new productions would be for a while either by local composers or by the one Italian.

Perhaps even more significant, the proportion of operatic performances in St. Petersburg to straight dramatic ones—a proportion that had plummeted after the Italians had quit St. Petersburg in the early thirties—now began to rise, and by the early forties actually overtook the spoken drama.²⁹ Soviet historians have speculated that this sudden dominance of Italian opera was due to its greater political safety, given the strictures of the Nikolaian censorship, whether compared with its French counterpart or with the straight dramatic theater.³⁰ But though this may have had something to do with the number of productions and performances, it cannot account for the full houses and the enthusiasm Gogol, among many others, wonderingly described. Over a single decade the Russian capital had turned from a town inexplicably unsusceptible to Italian music into one unexpectedly insatiable for it—and it had all been due to domestic, not imported, productions.

BUT NOW the Italians struck again, and decisively, for they had an invincible ally. In 1843, Giovanni Battista Rubini, the greatest tenor of the age but now getting past his prime, made a joint tour of Germany and the Netherlands with Liszt. Liszt, who had had a triumph in St. Petersburg the year before, now suggested (how cynically one cannot tell) that it was time for the forty-nine-year-old singer to conquer the cultural hinterland to the north and east. The ground had been broken for him at the beginning of the 1841-42 season, when the forty-four-year-old Giuditta Pasta had appeared with the Russian Opera in the title role of Norma, which she had created a decade earlier. In her honor, the other singers, all regular members of the Russian and German opera troupes, learned their roles in Italian, as they did for Semiramide, Tancredi, and Anna Bolena, the other operas in which Pasta appeared. In Vol’f’s recollection: “She astounded everyone with her style, but her singing turned out to be highly unsatisfactory. The greatly renowned prima donna’s voice was already jolly well shot.”³¹

If the aging Pasta had had a fiasco, the occasion of her appearance was nonetheless an event, and the aging Rubini was eagerly welcomed in her train. Arriving in St. Petersburg during Lent, he began with concert appearances. On the reopening of the theaters, he took the title role in the Russian Opera’s production of Rossini’s Otello. Connoisseurs of Italian singing, who knew enough to regard the roulades and trills, the frequent resort to head voice, the messa di voce, the portamento, and the rest of Rubini’s affectations as being as endemic to “the style and character of Italian music as the ogives are endemic to Gothic architecture,”³² greeted Rubini with enthusiasm. To most of the audience, however, Rubini’s “way of singing predominantly in falsetto . . . seemed at first a bit strange.”³³ But when the great tenor appeared in Bellini (Pirata, Puritani, Sonnambula), and especially as Edgar in Lucia, a role in which his performance was already a legend, and one that exploited his mannerisms as if by design, resistance evaporated: “Not only our melomanes but the whole uninitiated crowd went into an indescribable ecstasy. . . .St. Petersburg had never heard anything like it, and it dawned on everyone how such singing, so full of passion and feeling, was supposed to affect one. It would be no exaggeration to say that the whole house wept.”³⁴

Tsar Nikolai was waiting for this. He immediately appointed Rubini “director of singing” to the crown and, through his Intendant, Prince Pyotr Volkonsky, bade the Italian return in the fall of 1843 with a troupe, on terms no artist could refuse: a personal fee of 80,000 rubles for a season to last from October to February (= ca. 2,000 per performance; by contrast, Osip Petrov, the highest-paid singer in the Russian troupe, still received the scale decreed for Russian artists in 1827: 4,000 rubles—or, as paid in the 1840s in terms of a reformed currency, precisely 1,142 silver rubles—per annum).

At a stroke, Nikolai had made his capital one of the operatic centers of Europe, on a par with Paris, Vienna, and London; and he had identified himself in the eyes of world as an enlightened despot. These must be understood as his objectives. Much has been made, especially by Soviet historians, of the tyrant’s scorn for all things Russian; and it is true that among the “enlightened” aristocracy of the period (and of course not only in Russia), a “national” style could only mean an uncultivated or a rustic style. This may explain why no one expected much from the Russian Opera; from the aristocratic point of view it was a contradiction in terms. (And hence those comments overheard at the première of A Life for the Tsar and widely reported thereafter: “C’est de la musique des cochers”; “C’est mauvais; on entend cela dans tous les cabarets”; and so on.)³⁵

Yet snobbery cannot alone explain the hugely expensive enterprise Nikolai now undertook. It was first and foremost a diplomatic move. And, in a way that can only look perverse if approached (as it usually is) from anachronistic vantage points, it was a patriotic venture as well. To understand it as such we may look to one of the Tsar’s chief spokesmen, a journalist, censor, and police informer named Faddey Bulgarin (1789-1859). Writing in his own reactionary newspaper, The Northern Bee (Severnaya pchela), Bulgarin justified the enterprise in terms that must have reflected Nikolai’s own thinking:

Let’s admit it: without an Italian opera troupe it would always seem as if something were missing in the capital of the foremost empire in the world! There would seem to be no focal point for opulence, splendor, and cultivated diversion. In all the capitals of Europe the richest accoutrements, the highest tone, all the refinements of society may be found concentrated at the Italian Opera. This cannot be changed, nor should it be. The more noble delights, the greater the good. . . . Consequently, [the Italian Opera] not only satisfies our musical cravings but nourishes our national pride.³⁶

And so it came about that St. Petersburg became the home of two opera theaters (three for a season, but the Germans were soon squeezed out) with two repertories, two languages, and two audiences. As the novelist Pyotr Boborikin put it in his memoirs, “At the Russian Opera you would find visitors from the provinces, bureaucrats (especially from the Office of Provisions next door), officers, and kids from school,” while in the Italian Opera you would find “all of court-attached, diplomatic, military, and titled St. Petersburg.”³⁷

Though a little overdrawn, the essential accuracy of this observation is attested by César Cui. As a student he used to buy standing room for the Italian Opera (at twenty-five kopecks), in the “amphitheater” behind the balcony (“where there was a splendid view of the Bolshoy Theater’s chandelier, and also of the performers’ feet whenever they approached the footlights”). Upon receiving his officer’s commission, he found it “unseemly” to be seen with the students in the amphitheater, yet “seats in the Bolshoy were beyond my pocket.” The solution was to attend the Russian theater, the Mariyinsky, where prices were lower, “so I migrated thither, all the more so since I had just met M. A. Balakirev and learned from him of the existence of Russian composers.”³⁸

Meanwhile, just how unfashionable the Russian Opera became in the heyday of the Italian can be learned from an irritated memoir by Dargomïzhsky, who overheard a Count Bludov remark to a Princess Manvelova: “Ne chantez vous pas quelque chose de la Roussalka, on dit que c’est charmant.” Added Cui, who printed the memoir and italicized the “on dit”: “Rusalka had by then been given fifteen times or so, but he had never thought to buck the fashion and set foot in the Russian opera house.”³⁹

FRENZY

When Rubini reappeared in October, he had a hand-picked cast in tow headed by Giuseppe Tamburini (who also received 80,000 rubles) and the young Pauline Viardot (65,000 rubles). It was widely rumored that of the remaining artists at least one—Assandri, a prima donna “whose singing was as ugly as her appearance was beautiful,” according to the memoirs of one of Nikolai’s confidants⁴⁰—had been hand-picked not by Rubini but by the Tsar, who had seen her in Warsaw. The Italian singers completely monopolized the winter season of the “Russian Opera”; only two Russians—Osip Petrov and the Ukrainian-born baritone Semyon Gulak-Artemovsky (later the composer of some locally popular singspiels)—were allowed to share the boards with them. All the bénéfices went to the Italian stars. Viardot and Tamburini made sensations. The former, in a stroke of public-relations genius, interpolated Alyabyev’s popular romance “The Nightingale” (Solovey) into the lesson scene in Barbiere. St. Petersburg went mad:

Two subscriptions—one for thirty performances on Mondays and Fridays, the other for fifteen on Wednesdays—were sold out in an instant. At performances in which Viardot and Rubini took part, people who had never in their lives been higher up than the bel étage now congregated in the balconies and the gallery. In the lobbies all one heard was talk of “The Nightingale,” and how Viardot had sung it with the purest Russian accent, or of Sonnambula, in which she vied with Rubini and moved everyone to tears in the awakening scene. In all this there was not the slightest affectation; serious people, connoisseurs of music (not even excluding Glinka himself) were no less carried away than the high-society dilettantes.⁴¹

Considering the malicious irony with which Glinka described the Imperial Italian Opera in his memoirs, this testimony is valuable. The reasons for Glinka’s later disaffection, and the even more extreme disaffection of succeeding generations of Russian musicians, had only partly to do with musical (or dramatic) values.

The next season more world-class artists joined the roster: Marietta Alboni, Jeanne Castellan, Agostino Rovere. Subscriptions were increased to forty and twenty performances; with bénéfices, the season total came to seventy-six. The rage for Italian opera had become a mania, and the behavior of the Russian audience had achieved parity with that of audiences to the west. Vol’f describes flying wreaths and bouquets (“Until then St. Petersburg had not known the floral frenzy [tsvetobesiye],” he comments); loges turned into political and diplomatic meeting places (one was dubbed “la fosse aux lions”); other loges providing competing showcases for society belles.⁴² The public divided into warring factions over the prime donne. Viardists and Castel-lanists interfered with performances, exchanged blows. Satirists had a field day—though they had to be careful to aim their darts at melomanes from the ranks of the merchant class or the civil service, not the nobility. One such was the young Nikolai Nekrasov, who wrote a long essay in the Literaturnaya gazeta on the way the rage for Italian operas was transforming life in the Russian capital:

Everybody has begun to sing!

You have a notion to take a stroll on the Nevsky—”Uu-na for-ti-ma [sic] lag-rima, uuu-na ...” booms out behind you; you look into a coffee shop— roulades à la Tamburini meet you even on the stairs. You drop in on a family of your acquaintance, even one that lives all the way out on the Vïborg side of town, and they’ll immediately sit their daughter at the piano and force her to squeal her way through an aria from Norma or some other opera. You turn into the remotest little alleyway you can find, and you won’t go ten steps before you meet up with an organ grinder, who, seeing you from afar, has lost no time in starting up the finale to Pirata in full expectation of a munificent reward.⁴³

Highly placed Russian dilettantes began offering operas to the Italian troupe. Alexey Fyodorovich L’vov (1798-1870), the personal adjutant to the Tsar and the director of the Imperial Court Chapel Choir, whose chief claim to fame was having composed the Tsarist national anthem (Bozhe, tsarya khrani) some years earlier, was one of these. He had the libretto of his opera Bianca und Gualtiero translated from German into Italian expressly for the purpose of having it performed in the Russian capital. “Despite the participation of Viardot, Rubini, and Tamburini,” Vol’f notes, “this score attained what is called a succès d’estime.”⁴⁴ (Audiences, in fact, railed at having domestic imitations diluting their subscriptions, and the Tsar obligingly forbade further performances of operas by Russian composers at the Italian opera after the season of 1848-49.)⁴⁵ Otherwise the repertory for 1844-45 (Rubini’s last season) consisted entirely of Rossini (four operas), Bellini (four), and Donizetti (seven). The Russian Opera, in a state of near-total neglect, had a repertory of only seven works in all (by Glinka, Verstovsky, Weber, Meyerbeer, Hérold, Auber), and a season of only thirty performances, on Sundays only.

After one more season of attempting to compete (or rather, coexist) with the Italians, the Russian Opera was finally “banished” to Moscow (autumn 1846), leaving the St. Petersburg operatic stage entirely in the hands of the foreign troupe. Until 1850 the Russian troupe would appear in the Russian capital only for short guest seasons in the spring, after the Italians had gone home. It was an arrangement that has lived ever since in various sorts of infamy in the historiography of Russian music, both in the late nineteenth-century “nationalist” telling and in the more recent Soviet one. From 1850 the Russian capital again supported the two troupes full-time, though hardly on an equal basis.

Never again, for one thing, would the Russian opera sing at the Bolshoy kamennïy. Its rather skimpy schedule of performances was worked into the time available between dramatic spectacles at the so-called Alexandrinsky Theater, the chief house for Russian drama, and between the clowns and the bareback riders at the Circus Theater (Teatr-tsirk), which latter eventually became their home. The troupe was miserably equipped, miserably paid, thoroughly demoralized. A Life for the Tsar, the showpiece of the Russian repertoire, was done so poorly during this worst of all periods that the composer himself, as his sister has related, could not bear to sit through it.⁴⁶ Glinka, much embittered in his late years by artistic conditions in Russia, and creatively paralyzed by frustration, would not live to see a change.

Meanwhile, the subsidized Italian troupe was reorganized both as to personnel and as to repertoire. Rubini had retired, and Viardot, having been seized with whooping cough toward the end of the 1845-46 season, would not return to Russia until 1852. Of the original stars only Tamburini remained. The St. Petersburg prime donne in the late forties were Teresa de Giuli-Borsi and Erminia Frezzolini (the latter greeted on her debut by a delirious press reception, to which Vladimir Stasov, later such a shrill opponent of the Italian opera, made a rapturous contribution);⁴⁷ the primi tenori Carlo Guaseo and Lorenzo Salvi; both Filippo Colini and Filippo Coletti sang baritone roles. (By this time the stars were receiving 100,000 rubles per annum apiece, a sum that, equaling 55,000 gold francs, made St. Petersburg the most lucrative operatic venue in Europe.) As these names already suggest, the main repertory innovation was the advent of Verdi, beginning with I Lombardi in the fall of 1845 (“O mia letizia,” sung by Salvi, scored an instant hit).⁴⁸ The immediate post-Viardot seasons brought Ernani and I due Foscari (1846-47), and Giovanna d’Arco (1849-50). Verdi productions in the fifties would include Nabucco (1851, as Nino), Rigoletto (1853), Macbeth (1854, as Sivardo il Sassone), II Trovatore (1855), La Traviata (1856), Luisa Miller and Les Vêpres siciliennes (both 1857, the latter as Giovanna di Guzman).

The repertory expanded in a different direction during the 1849-50 season when the troupe presented Les Huguenots, sung in Italian to a disguised libretto under the title I Guelfi e i Ghibellini (four years later Le Prophète would arrive, disguised as UAssedio di Ghent). Les Huguenots was chiefly a vehicle for the St. Petersburg debuts of Mario and Grisi, who created sensations in this and other operas (including Don Giovanni) of a kind that Vol’f, looking back in 1877, insisted had never been equaled since.⁴⁹ Mario (himself of noble birth) became the personal protégé of the Tsar.

An indication of how a privileged theatrical enterprise could flourish under Russian conditions (viz., an autocracy that owned all theaters directly, subsidized them from the Tsar’s private purse, and administered them through the civil service) was given the next season, when the critic Bertold Damcke, having dared find deficiencies in Mario’s performances, found himself deprived of his forum (the French-language Journal de S-t Pétersbourg) at the instigation of Alexander Gedeonov, the Intendant of the Imperial Theaters, who had secured the assistance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (i.e., the censorship) to protect the huge financial investment the state treasury had made in the singer. In a similar case, a threatened hissing party was dissuaded by a counterthreat of police action.⁵⁰

The Tsar was known to meddle personally in matters artistic, if in his considered opinion they seemed to warrant political control (and in Russia—then as later—the line between the artistic and the political domains was blurrier than anywhere else). A case in point, related by Anton Rubinstein, who witnessed it, sheds some light as well on the blurry relations between matters of church and matters of state in Nikolai’s Russia. The Tsar was attending the première of Le Prophète:

In the intermission following the coronation scene, [His Majesty] Nikolai Pavlovich came onto the stage, approached Mario, conversed with him, made some flattering remarks about his performance and then asked him to remove his crown. Nikolai Pavlovich broke the cross off the crown and gave it back to the dumbfounded singer.⁵¹

In Russia, where orthodoxy and autocracy went hand in hand, it was unacceptable that the leader of an insurrection be shown sporting a cross.

New artists of the fifties, the great decade of the Imperial Italian Opera, included the then as yet unknown Enrico Tamberlik (who at his benefit in December 1850 “acquainted us with the C|t [in Otello] that would later gain him a European reputation”),⁵² Giorgio Ronconi, Luigi Lablache (then at the dusk of his career and mainly confined to buffo roles), Tacchinardi-Persiani (also noticeably in decline), Achille de Bassini, Medori, Pozzolini, Nantier-Didier, Lagrua, Brambilla—to list only those discussed individually in Budden’s The Operas of Verdi. Two not named there but who must be mentioned here were Enrico Calzolari (1823-88) and Angiolina Bosio (1830-59), who made their mature careers (if Bosio can be said to have had a mature career) almost entirely in Russia. Calzolari, a tenor di grazia who appeared in no fewer than fifty-four operas on the St. Petersburg stage between 1853 and 1871,⁵³ carried an official title as “First Singer of Their Imperial Majesties.”

As for Bosio, it was she who replaced Viardot as St. Petersburg’s special darling. She never sang in Italy past the age of eighteen, but had made her prior reputation in Paris and London, as well as America. Engaged for the 1855-56 season on terms only St. Petersburg could afford, she made her debut there as Gilda, a role she had created for Co vent Garden. An overnight sensation, she reigned for four years as the great Russian Verdi heroine. Vol’f’s 1884 recollection of Bosio as Violetta is full of loyal nostalgia: “Since Bosio no one has sung the role here to such perfection, not excepting Patti.”⁵⁴ Serov, an avowed opponent of the Italian Opera, went further, attributing whatever success La Traviata had achieved in Russia to Bosio alone: “Right now,” he wrote in 1856, “this opera is attracting and will continue to attract a crowd, because Mme Bosio as Violetta sings marvelously, working wonders with this music. Given such a bewitching performance one will sometimes give the composer credit for subtlety and tenderness in the dramatic characterization, as well as beautiful ideas. Yet without Mme Bosio you wouldn’t find such qualities in this score with a microscope.”⁵⁵

The idealized affection in which Bosio continued to live in Russian memory had to do with the romantic circumstances of her sudden illness and Violetta-like death in St. Petersburg, caused by pneumonia at the end of the season of 1858-59. She was twenty-eight. Some idea of the devotion she inspired may be gained from an unlikely source, the memoirs of an impressionable youth of the period, Prince Pyotr Kropotkin. The famous anarchist recalled:

When the prima donna Bosio fell ill, thousands of people, chiefly of the youth, stood till late at night at the door of her hotel to get news of her. She was not beautiful, but seemed so much so when she sang that young men madly in love with her could be counted by the hundred; and when she died, she had a burial such as no one had ever had at St. Petersburg before.⁵⁶

Other decidedly nonfrivolous types who worshiped Bosio included the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, once so condescending toward the Italian opera, who memorialized his heroine in sentimental verse (“Daughter of Italy! With Russian frost / How hard to harmonize the noonday rose”); and—most surprising of all—the radical writer Nikolai Chernïshevsky, whose somewhat paradoxical relationship to the Italian Opera will be a matter to examine more closely further on. Yet despite such deviant modes of reception, the Italian Opera never ceased to be Russia’s “official” opera, the artistic emblem of the Russian court and aristocracy.

AN OUTSTANDING illustration of its status was the way it came to Moscow. After the Zamboni troupe’s failed attempt to establish itself in the second city, there had been no Italian opera to speak of there until 1844, when the Moscow Intendant of the Imperial Theaters (Alexey Verstovsky, himself a distinguished composer of Russian operas) had invited the Odessa troupe up for a guest tour featuring Lorenzo Salvi, who had not yet sung in St. Petersburg, as star performer. A subscription was gotten up to establish a regular troupe the next year on the coattails of the brilliant first season at St. Petersburg, but it had to be discontinued after a single season. From 1845, Moscow had relied for its Italian opera on the occasional touring provincial company, even as the star-studded Imperial troupe was hitting its stride in St. Petersburg.⁵⁷

But in the late summer of 1856, there was an occasion—a doubly official one—for which Italian opera on a grand scale was deemed indispensable: the opening of the newly restored Moscow Bolshoy Theater, celebrated amid the festivities attending the coronation of Alexander II. The whole Italian troupe, headed by Calzolari, Lablache, De Bassini, and of course Bosio, was sent down from St. Petersburg to inaugurate the theater. Between 20 August and 27 September they gave more than twenty performances of eight operas by Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi.⁵⁸ Thus did the Russian Empire celebrate its great occasions of state.

Thereafter, for the duration of Alexander II’s reign, the Moscow Italian Opera (a branch office of the St. Petersburg company) would inhabit the second city’s Bolshoy Theater. For a time, as in St. Petersburg, it would totally eclipse the Russian. Regular subscription seasons began in 1861, at the initiative of Leonid Fyodorovich Lvov, Verstovsky’s successor as Intendant of the Moscow Imperial Theaters, whose brother had composed that old ersatz Bianca e Gualtiero. The early seasons, on a lowish budget, were for the most part starless. The level of performance was consequently no match for St. Petersburg, but it was apparently good enough for Lev Tolstoy, who attended the Moscow Italian opera regularly in his younger, not yet art-hating days. His diaries record a few laconic reactions, mostly favorable: “Even the music was very pleasant” (on Rossini’s Mosè), “I was up to understanding and enjoying the first two acts but then I got tired” (on Guillaume Tell). Faust, on the other hand, was “stupid.”⁵⁹

From 1868 the Moscow seasons, indeed the Bolshoy Theater itself, became the bailiwick of the impresario Eugenio Merelli, son of Bartolomeo Merelli, the old dictator of La Scala and Donizetti’s old librettist. It was Merelli who succeeded in engaging Desirée Artôt, who enlivened the Moscow scene and captured the heart of that unlikeliest of suitors, Chaikovsky (hired to write recitatives for Auber’s Fra Diavolo, performed, in Italian, as Artôt’s bénéfice in January 1870). A single appearance of Tamberlik (as Manrico) in October 1870 and the guest tours of Adelina Patti beginning the next season were the artistic high points of the official Italian Opera’s Moscow branch.

SUBSIDENCE

So it has been two decades now (or nearly) that the Russian Opera has suffered extraordinarily from the prevalence among the public of a taste for a foreign opera, an Italian one. There are an abundance of people in St. Petersburg who, having held loges by subscription at the Italian Opera for fifteen years running, have hardly even heard of the existence among us of a Russian opera theater, have no idea that there is such a thing as Ruslan and Lyudmila, or Dargomizhsky’s Rusalka, and only just heard A Life for the Tsar by chance because they wanted to see the inside of the new Mariyinsky Theater. There can be no denying that Italian opera, excellently performed by wonderful Italian singers, is a fine thing, even an aesthetic one; it can give much enjoyment to the most enlightened taste. Rubini, Lablache, Tamburini, Malibran in the epoch of their greatest brilliance managed to turn even Goethe’s head, as is plain from his letters to his wife. There can be no denying that such a dainty dish . . . ought to be part of the luxurious life of all the great world capitals. Neither Paris nor London could do without its Italian opera; in Vienna, too, and in Berlin the Italian opera appears frequently. But what a difference compared with us! Berlin, Vienna, Paris all put their own opera first.⁶⁰

So would St. Petersburg, ere long. In 1859 a seeming disaster befell the Russian opera troupe. The Circus Theater, their home since their return from Muscovite exile, burned down. Yet it was a blessing in disguise, for it enabled the dawn of a new era. Arts policies under Alexander II were more favorably disposed to the national company. Active patriotic propaganda in the wake of the Emancipation and, especially, the Polish uprising of the early sixties (not to mention the many plots and attempts on the life of the Tsar) led to the cultivation of native Russian art as an instrument of state ideology. The period around 1860 was also a time of intensive professionalization in all phases of Russian musical life, led by the indefatigable Anton Rubinstein. Accordingly, a new and very well appointed theater was built on the old Circus site expressly for the Russian opera and ballet troupes: the legendary Mariyinsky (in Soviet times the Kirov), which opened its doors in 1860.

Still, the first two seasons of the new decade were dominated by Verdi’s presence in the Russian capital. On the surface this brought new luster and legitimacy to the city as a center for Italian opera; at the same time, though, it brought certain festering matters to a head. Both Verdi’s trips were connected with the staging of the opera that the new Intendant of the Imperial Theaters, Andrey Ivanovich Saburov, had commissioned from him. Had it not been for Emma Lagrua’s illness and subsequent loss of her voice, La Forza del Destino would have had its première in the early months of 1862. As it was, it had to wait until October (November, New Style), when Leonora was sung by Caroline Barbot, a singer new to St. Petersburg whom Verdi himself had recommended for the part. Nevertheless, there was a major Verdi première during the earlier season: Un Ballo in Maschera, in a strong performance by many of the same singers who would eventually do Forza—Tamberlik, Graziani, Nantier-Didier. Verdi’s well-publicized presence in the city added a special naive excitement to the performances of all his works; here the Russian capital showed itself still, aufond, a gawky provincial town:

From 24 November—that is, from the day of Verdi’s arrival in St. Petersburg—each performance of his operas Traviata (4 December [1861]), Trovatore (6 December), Un Ballo (9 December) invariably finished with long, loud, abundant yet futile calls for the composer. Blessed with a congenial personality, un uomo aggradevole sociale, as his Italian chums would have it, a merry companion in the circle of his friends but at all times modest, Verdi avoids official manifestations of approval, he recoils from ovations. It might easily have been true that on the evenings in question the maestro was not even in the theater, for, as is well known, he prefers to listen to the works of others. We wish to say only that not one of these calls for him went by without some comical misadventure or, in one case, a strange (to put it tactfully) outcome. On Wednesday, 6 December, the calls for Verdi were especially insistent. The voice of Tamberlik, who tried to announce that the maestro was not present in the theater, was completely drowned out by the redoubled demands for his appearance. In order to put a stop to all the vain shouting, it was necessary to send out the esteemed prompter of our Italian opera troupe, Sgr. Garignani, with the same news. As soon as the multitude of Verdians caught sight of a man on stage in an ordinary suit instead of a costume, all thunder rained down upon him: “Bravo Verdi! Evviva il maestro! Bravissimo!” No matter how hard Sgr. Garignani tried to convey, by word or gesture, that he was not Verdi, it was all in vain. Triumphant applause accompanied him into the wings.⁶¹

Yet this delirium did not repeat itself the next November: Forza did not take hold. Pyotr Sokalsky, a Ukrainian composer who was then reporting on St. Petersburg musical life as correspondent for a Moscow newspaper, wrote of “satisfaction in the parterre and the loges, dissatisfaction in the foyer and the gallery.”⁶² By 1881 Forza would have only nineteen performances in the city of its première, while Ballo would amass ninety-two.

Indeed, that gala première turned in the end into a rather equivocal and ill-presaging event, owing chiefly to resentments over finances and payments—not only the actual expenses, but the invidious double scale that consigned Russian performers and composers to an essentially unsupported existence on the fringes of their own country’s artistic life. It was a situation comparable to that which obtained in America in the first half of this century and bred the same hostilities. Verdi had been paid 60,000 francs (= 33,000 rubles) at a time when the statutory limit for compensation to a Russian artist for a single performance (even if that meant composing the score) remained fixed just where it had been set at the beginning of Nikolai’s reign some three and a half decades before. In addition Verdi was granted an expense account of 5,000 rubles and a per-performance honorarium of 806 rubles 45 kopeks.⁶³ As a result, most Russian musicians had their knives out, and just about everyone’s perception of the opera’s quality was measured against, and colored by, their perception of the wastefulness of the enterprise. Thus Vol’f, normally a dispassionate chronicler:

Saburov had made a show of generosity at the expense of the state exchequer and paid Verdi 60,000 gold francs plus traveling expenses. Everyone was expecting miracles for such money, and meanwhile the opera turned out to be the famous composer’s weakest work. At the first performance Verdi was much applauded and called for, of course, out of courtesy, but subsequently there was hissing to be heard and poor receipts. As a result the sixty thousand turned out to have been thrown out the window for the sake of Saburov’s desire to gain fame in Europe as an enlightened patron of the arts.⁶⁴

Alexander Serov, never dispassionate, was even blunter:

Maestro Verdi was mistaken in his opinion of the northern barbarians. The “Scythians” have judged his new opera, against all expectation, at its true worth. It was not hissed throughout out of sheer courtesy, out of hospitality. You can’t very well abuse someone you yourself have invited. But woe betide any Russian composer who may appear before the St. Petersburg public with such an opera. He won’t get a production like the one Verdi was given, not even in his dreams! His score will appear before the court in all its poverty. People are always a hundred times stricter with one of their own, who comes without benefit of fashion or fame. What would follow such a fiasco would be nothing short of scandal. . . . And rightly so!⁶⁵

This was a turning point. The later sixties were a period of marked decline for the St. Petersburg Italian opera. The repertoire was ossifying, growing stale. There were no composers on the Italian horizon to compare with Verdi or his predecessors. The novelties in the seasons between Forza and the next Verdi première (Don Carlo in 1869, another fiasco that according to César Cui demonstrated “the total collapse of the Italian school and the facelessness of its great maestro”)⁶⁶ were either ephemerae by Bottesini (Chatterton), Pe-drotti (Fiorina), Ricci (Rolla, Crispino e la comare), or Cagnoni (Don Bucefalo, which proved, again according to Cui, that “even the Italians despise their music and caricature it”); or they were the work of non-Italians (Gounod, Boieldieu, David, Meyerbeer). Interest in Wagner, meanwhile, was given a great boost by his personal appearances in St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1863, much trumpeted by Serov, if not the greatest surely the most prolific music critic Russia (if not the world) had ever seen. St. Petersburg would not see a Wagner opera on stage, however, for another half decade.

Italian performing talent seemed, at least from the vantage point of Russia, to be declining along with composition. In his account of the 1864-65 season, Vol’f notes that “there has been a general cooling toward the Italian opera, probably on account of the shortage of stars of the first magnitude in the female roster.”⁶⁷ A couple of seasons later the situation had grown worse: “There has been no change in personnel, and all the same operas were performed. Everyone complained about the monotony of the repertoire and began to talk as if the very costly Italian opera were altogether superfluous.”⁶⁸ By the middle of the 1866-67 season, rumors were rife that it would be the last. César Cui reacted with predictable self-congratulation: “What is most pleasing in this is the fact that the Italian Opera died a natural death, not a violent one. . . . Thus St. Petersburg turns out to be the first capital that will do without Italian opera. The foreign press is applauding us. One newspaper has even invoked that well-known verse of Voltaire’s, ‘C’est du Nord, à present que nous vient la lumière.’“⁶⁹

Though reports of its demise were on this occasion premature, the fortunes of the Italian troupe continued to decline. In an article summing up the 1868—69 season, Cui could crow that whereas the Italian opera had ended the season with a deficit of 200,000 rubles, the far less expensive Russian opera, riding the crest of a new-won popularity, had shown a profit of 60,000.⁷⁰ Yet it was not the Russian Opera that was giving the Italian its stiffest competition but the French theater, enjoying a new burst of popularity thanks to what a horrified Kropotkin called “the putrid Offenbachian current” that “infected all Europe”:

Both [the Italian Opera and the Russian] were now found “tedious” and the cream of St. Petersburg society crowded to a vulgar theater where the second-rate stars of the Paris small theaters won easy laurels from their Horse Guard admirers, or went to see La Belle Hélène, which was played on the Russian stage, while our great dramatists were forgotten.⁷¹

What staved off the inevitable for a while was the arrival out of the blue of the young Adelina Patti, she of the “marvelous metallic voice and mechanical, supernatural perfection of coloratura technique,”⁷² at the tail end of the otherwise disastrous season just described. The phenomenal general intoxication she produced has been immortalized by ridicule in Musorgsky’s hilarious Peepshow (Rayok), composed the next year. There, it is Feofil Tolstoy (1810-81)—a dilettante composer of markedly Italianate leanings (his Il birichino di Parigi, mounted by the Italian Opera in 1849, had provoked Nikolai’s ban on native products) but better remembered for the music criticism he wrote under the pseudonym Rostislav—who is shown in the throes of Pattimania. She had her detractors (Cui: “The first time I heard her I was bowled over by her vocal prestidigitation; the second time I listened with indifference to her familiar tricks; thereafter I slept”).⁷³ But the rabidity she inspired was unprecedented, infecting even some of the Italian Opera’s most outspoken foes. The most stiff-necked of all, Alexander Serov, actually composed for Patti an Ave Maria d’una penitente (figure 10.1, overleaf), which the diva sang in his memory following his sudden death in 1871.

As long as Patti was there to sing it, there would remain an avid audience in the Russian capital for the Italian Opera’s traditional repertoire. Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, all bloomed anew. When she sang Zerlina, even Don Giovanni was a popular opera. All at once the Italian opera was again the hottest ticket in St. Petersburg. The troupe’s finances were shipshape, prospects ever bright. The old ironizing commenced once more; thus Chaikovsky: “Is it not flattering to our national pride, when all is said and done, that at a time when so many capitals, directing their envious glance at the northern barbarians, are forced to content themselves with their homegrown (albeit excellent) opera, we possess Italians with Patti at their head?”⁷⁴ But then came the evening of 1 February 1877, Patti’s bénéfice in the role of Gilda:

FIGURE 10.1. Alexander Serov’s tribute to Adelina Patti, composed in 1869, published (by “B. [recte V .] Bessel, S^t Pietroburgo”) in 1870, and sung in the composer’s memory by the dedicatee in 1971 (Asafyev collection, Russian National Library, Moscow)

The beneficiary was greeted with the customary triumph and showered with flowers. The opera went better than ever; everyone noticed that the beneficiary was singing and acting with an ardor that was not only unusual, but uncharacteristic of her, especially her scenes and duets with [the primo tenore, Ernest] Nicolini. Among those who noticed was the prima donna’s husband, the Marquis de Caux, who was sitting as always in the first row in on the right aisle. As soon as the second act was over he ran straightaway into the wings and fell upon Patti with reproaches for her brazen public coquetry. The stormiest scene imaginable ensued; the enraged diva hurled her jewels in her husband’s face and threw him out of her dressing room, declaring she would no longer live with him. The intermission, meanwhile, had gone on at unheard of length. Baron [Karl] Kister [1821-93; Intendant of the Imperial Theaters, 1875-81] succeeded with effort in getting the evening’s beneficiary to calm down and finish the opera. As a result of the scandal there was a trial en séparation de corps et de biens; the Marquis purchased his freedom by agreeing to pay his rapacious wife a million and a half francs. After this neither Patti nor Nicolini ever returned to St. Petersburg.⁷⁵

Which doomed the Italian Opera there. It hobbled along for a few more seasons on second-rate singers and third-rate repertoire (Marchetti, Gammieri). In 1879 the company “made a concession to the Zeitgeist,” as Vol’f put it,⁷⁶ and essayed Tannhäuser with Emma Albani as Elsa and Antonio Cotogni as Wolfram. The next year Lohengrin followed, without an international star save Cotogni. But here the Italian Opera was following the Russian, which had produced both Wagner operas years before and (particularly in the choral and orchestral departments) performed them better. Vocally, the Russian troupe had improved to the point where the two companies were close to meeting in the middle. As a matter of fact, the Russian Opera was by then competing with the Italian on the latter’s home ground. It maintained three Verdi operas in repertory (the three one would expect: Rigoletto, Traviata, and Trovatore) and had the temerity to add Aida to its roster only one season later than the Italian troupe (1876-77). Verdi’s opera “was received just as well in the Mariyinsky Theater as in the Bolshoy.”⁷⁷ The ultimate turnabout came in 1880, when by special dispensation the Italian Opera marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reign of Alexander II with a performance of the specially translated “La vita per lo Tzar” A bass from the Russian opera (Vladimir Vasilyev, known as “Vasilyev I”) was lent for the occasion to render the role of Susanin. Another Russian opera presented in the eighties by the Italian troupe in St. Petersburg (and only by it) was Anton Rubinstein’s Nerone, which had been written to Jules Barbier’s libretto for the Paris Opéra.

The death knell was sounded by the accession of Alexander III, the “Bourgeois Tsar,” whose jingoistic arts policies precisely reversed the double standard his grandfather Nikolai had imposed forty years before, and who in 1882 decided to abrogate the crown monopoly on theaters, leading to a great proliferation of private theatrical enterprises (professional and amateur), quite a few operatic ones among them. (Those of Sergey Ivanovich Zimin and the railroad tycoon Savva Ivanovich Mamontov achieved particular eminence; it was Ma-montov who gave Chaliapin his start.) Without the support of the crown and the high aristocracy, an imported Italian opera was untenable. As Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the new Intendant, put it at a meeting with the artists of the Mariyinsky Theater in September 1881, it was now the policy of the Imperial Theaters that “Russian opera . . . occupy within Russia the same place as is accorded national operas in the West.”⁷⁸ Accordingly, the permanent Italian opera troupes in both Russian capitals were disbanded—first in Moscow (1882), and then in St. Petersburg (1885). The Bolshoy kamennïy theater was razed and rebuilt as the St. Petersburg Conservatory, whose opera workshop now occupies the space in which the première of Forza took place. From Alexander’s reign up to the present day, pride of place in the Russian operatic repertory has gone to the native product—by the 1880s a national school of world caliber, whose chefs d’oeuvre had already begun to be exported—and all opera of whatever provenance has been sung in Russian.

IMAGE

I am willing to admit that no self-respecting capital can do without an Italian opera. But as a Russian musician can I, listening to Mme Patti’s trills, forget for even one moment the humiliation our native art suffers in Moscow, where it can find neither space nor time for its support? Can I forget the pitiful way in which our Russian opera has been forced to vegetate, when we have in our repertory several operas of such quality that any other self-respecting capital would show them off as priceless treasures? They’ll tell me by way of answer that when there is a Patti to be had in Moscow, it’s ridiculous even to think about Russian opera. But to refute such an objection I need only point to Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Munich, Dresden, and Prague. As far as Mme Patti herself is concerned, I am not in the least astonished at the ecstasies she calls forth, and I laugh at the purists who speak of her with feigned indifference only because the pleasure of hearing her costs so much. Mme Patti is a ravishing phenomenon; phenomenons are expensive and for the simplest of reasons—they are rare. No one who heard Mme Patti, as I did, on Saturday last, 6 November, in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, will complain at what he had to shell out in order to obtain such enjoyment. Her singing in this opera boggled my mind. In the enchanting beauty of her voice, the nightingale purity of her trills, the fabulous lightness of her coloratura there is something superhuman. Yes, exactly: superhuman.⁷⁹

So wrote the moderate and evenhanded Chaikovsky in 1871, at the beginning of his short career as a newspaper reviewer, summing up the Russian response to Italian opera as well as any single commentary might do. In his effort to see both sides he touches upon practically every theme: the social status of the genre, the specific pleasures (in the Russian way of seeing things, nonmusical pleasures) to be gained from it, the importance of star performers to its success. But above all, he emphasizes the harm its presence was doing, given the specific political and economic conditions in which art was supported and purveyed under the Russian autocracy.

The uniformity, as well as the extremity, of the resistance to Italian opera on the part of Russian musicians—and particularly the ones who matter to us now—is surely the uniquely significant part of the story of Italian opera’s reception in the Empire. It was no mere concomitant to “nationalism,” that ever-ready ersatz category by means of which facile historiography continues to marginalize all European artistic activity east of the Danube. It went far deeper than that into matters of heart and belly that always precede matters of mind and taste. Quite simply, practitioners of the very new (and, until the 1860s, socially unrecognized) profession of “composer” in Russia could ill afford to see merit in that which posed a grave and present threat to their existence. Were there no state-supported Italian opera to contend with, torturing them at once with professional frustration and creative isolation, it is unlikely, moreover, that composers of Russian opera would have proven so prone to assume those radically pure aesthetic and stylistic stances for which they live in history, if not on stage. The opposition in Russia seems at times a caricatural one between “opera without music” and “opera without singing.”

There has, in any case, always been a special Russian high-mindedness about the arts, and never more than in the nineteenth century. Partly it was the result of the early popularity in Russia of German idealistic philosophy. Partly it was a response to the pressure of a despotic censorship: at a time when open political, social, or economic debate was impossible, serious discussion of public policy had to go on in the guise of literary and artistic criticism—and creation. Nowhere else did artists feel such an uncoerced pressure to be citizens. (Coercion came later.)

We shall see that many members of the so-called intelligentsia were at their least intelligent when the subject was music. But music had its own intelligentsia, every bit as idealistic and puritanical within its own domain as their more overtly politicizing counterparts. And that is how one must understand the young Chaikovsky—thought by many in the West to be a “Westernizer,” and no one’s idea of a “Wagnerian”—when he writes:

I consider the Italian opera with all its attributes to be a matter that has nothing to do with the higher purposes of art, a matter in the highest degree antimusical. In the Italian opera it is not the singers who exist to perform musical works of art, but rather the music that discharges a purely official duty in furnishing something for this or that artist to sing. In the face of such a reversal of means and ends can one make any serious critical evaluation of repertory?⁸⁰

Indeed, the important critics—Serov, Cui, Laroche, Stasov—did not waste many words on the Italian opera. They treated it as something beneath their notice, except when it came to making invidious comparisons. Considering the popularity of what they were ignoring, it was a notably quixotic position they were affecting, with predictable consequences so far as their influence was concerned. Thus we have a situation in which the public and the idealistic musical intelligentsia stood resolutely back to back—a quintessential “romantic” situation.

Since romanticism is neither a trait nor a movement prominently associated with Russia, some background may be desirable. Prince Odoyevsky, the Moscow litterateur, can be our focal point. On the basis of his collection of stories entitled Russian Nights (1844) he is often called the Russian E.T.A. Hoffmann; and indeed, Odoyevsky’s whole outlook is Hoffmannesque in its extreme commitment to an antirationalist, anti-utilitarian idealism derived, like Hoffmann’s, from Swedenborg and Schelling. It was the old story of Geist (in Russian, dukh) vs. Sinnlichkeit (in Russian, chuvstvennost’), entailing a commitment to German instrumental music as the highest and most philosophical of all the arts.

Among the stories in Russian Nights are two musical tales, one entitled “The Last Quartet of Beethoven,” the other “Sebastian Bach.” The only Italian operas Odoyevsky recognized were those written by the German-speaking Mozart; and among these Don Giovanni—minus the final sextet, of course—was singled out by the Russian Hoffmann (exactly as it had been by the German one) for its exemplary romanticism. Odoyevsky propagated his musical views prolifically: his collected writings on music fill a volume of some seven hundred pages, and he was active also as a musical antiquarian. His education, his philosophical commitments, his early adherence to “absolute music,” and—not least—his social eminence, all made Odoyevsky a natural leader of the opposition to Italian opera. No one played a greater role than he in shaping nineteenth-century “intelligent” taste.

Odoyevsky’s first onslaught against the Italian taste took the form of a scene in a satirical novella entitled “Vexing Days” (Dni dosad), which he published in 1823, aged nineteen, in the European Courier (Vestnik Yevropi), one of the major intellectual journals of the time. The story’s central episode depicts Moscow’s brief dalliance with Italian opera as brought to the city by the Zamboni troupe, emissary of spiritual emptiness. A Count Gluposilin (“Strength-and-Stupidity”) is holding forth to young Arist, the author’s surrogate, on the merits of Rossini during a performance of Tancredi. (They listen to the arias, converse during the recitatives.) “Di tanti palpiti,” the moment everyone has been waiting for, proves too much for Arist:

—“What!” I shouted, “Tancredi is singing an ecossaise, and a pretty poor one at that! And everyone is delighted with it??”

—“Calm down,” Gluposilin remonstrated, on the verge of anger, “you want to quarrel with the whole world. Don’t you know, kind sir, this aria is so good that every gondolier in Italy is singing it!”

—“I quite agree,” I answered him coolly. “This is a fine aria for a gondolier; but for Tancredi it won’t do at all. Do Mozart and Méhul write their operas like that? With what simplicity and strength they depict the slightest tinge of character! You won’t find Tancredi expressing his joys and sorrows like any old gondolier with them!”

—“Enough already! Forgive me,” Gluposilin insisted, “but this aria is first-rate! It’s beyond argument, beyond argument!” ... I had my revenge on Gluposilin. . . . For the whole duration of the performance I tormented him with my doubts. When, for example, he went into ecstasies at roulades and trills, I stopped him cold with the remark that they were being done to the words Io tremo, i miei tormenti, il mio dolente cor. Another time I pointed out to him that Argirio really shouldn’t be using a dance tune to tell Amenaide Non ti son più genitor; and so on. ... I spent the evening angry at myself for understanding Italian, angry at the singers for their distinct enunciation; it took away half my pleasure.⁸¹

Four and a half decades later Odoyevsky was still at it. His rage at the destructive popularity of Italian music—fed, to be sure, by culture snobbery and religious bigotry, but also by outrage at the lack of outlet for the work of Russian composers—reached its peak in 1867 with a blistering tirade against the installation of Merelli’s permanent troupe in the Bolshoy Theater. Can Italian opera further our artistic education by so much as a hair? he asked rhetorically (using his own italics), and thundered in response:

But the ignorance of the majority of the Italian singers who come here passes all belief. Not only do they not understand, they do not even know about anything else in the musical world outside their own so-called music, which is to say an effeminate, sickly, constantly lying sort of music that depends on vocal acrobatics and banal effects; or else it is based, as in the Papal Choir, on the shameful mutilation of men—the pitiful result of that leaden yoke that has always weighed upon poor Italy. It is the song of slaves, forced through their tears to entertain a company of Metternichs or else King Bomba.

What have these wanton moans to do with our healthy, virginal, scrupulous musical environment? In all likelihood tawdry, empty Italianate sonorities would knock all sense out of our national feelings, they would teach us to listen with a straight face and without disgust to the various rattling noises that issue forth from dolls; these dolls dance with their voices on a tightrope (a fairly difficult operation, but so much the worse), and meanwhile one doll passes itself off as Norma, another as Semiramide, a third as Francis I, and all of a sudden (or so I hear) as Don Carlos, too.⁸²

Odoyevsky ended his screed with a plea: “Man cannot live on ‘verdyatina’ alone.” The epithet, formed by adding to Verdi’s name a suffix denoting some sort of edible animal flesh (as in telyatina, “veal”, from telyonok, “calf”), permanently enriched the Russian lexicon of musical invective. The connotation is of something tasty but cheap. (A memoir by an old Mariyinsky Theater hand recorded a comment by the eighteen-year-old son of the leading basso of the Russian Opera Company on scanning the repertory for the season 1900-1901: “Again this verdyatina!” sniffed Igor Stravinsky.)⁸³ It was Odoyevsky (though many claimed credit) who called La Forza del Destino a “polka in four acts.”⁸⁴ Another typical Odoyevsky coinage was vzbellinif sya, which plays on the verb vzbelenif sya, meaning “to become enraged after ingesting henbane (belena).” Just so were Bellini’s corybantic followers driven mad.⁸⁵ Odoyevsky’s many sallies at the expense of the Italian opera—its composers, its singers, above all its audience—set the tone for decades of high-minded Russian raillery.

Glinka, Odoyevsky’s exact contemporary, was by contrast a true connoisseur of Italian vocal music and singing, and a serious student of it. After his early, desultory lessons with the younger Zamboni, Glinka went in pilgrimage to Milan in the early 1830s to continue his studies. There he became acquainted with Bellini and Donizetti and wrote some very creditable imitations of their work. His earliest publications, issued during his Milanese period, comprised a number of instrumental tributes to the Italian opera. In addition to several sets of piano variations they included a couple of ambitious concerted compositions: a “Divertimento brillante” for six instruments on themes from La Sonnambula, and a “Serenata” for seven on themes from Anna Bolena. Italianate style would be for Glinka a permanent acquisition and a principal resource.

Yet by the time he established his reputation as an opera composer, and especially by the time it came to write his memoirs, Glinka had come to regard, or at least to advertise, his Italian apprenticeship as something long outgrown, and expressed himself on the subject of Italian music and singing with an irony that amounted, at times, to bitterness. At the first rehearsal of A Life for the Tsar, Vorob’yova recalled, the composer made a point of asserting his hostility to all Italian music, gratuitously informing the cast that he had never once attended the opera in St. Petersburg, “even though I know that you recently put on Semiramide very successfully.”⁸⁶ In the memoirs, he let no opportunity go by to remind the reader of his mature indifference to “virtuosité,” even when recalling the gala première of Anna Bolena, which he had been privileged to attend at La Scala.⁸⁷ About Rubini’s fateful St. Petersburg debut in 1843, he waxed derisive: the tenor was “not Jupiter [as Count Wielhorski, among others, had called him] but a ruin. ... He sang either with much too much strength or else you could hardly hear him; you might say he just opened his mouth while the audience sang his pianissimo for him, which made them feel great, of course, so they applauded with fervor.”⁸⁸

In the memoirs, Glinka ascribed his aversion to “Italian ‘songbirds’ and fashionable Italian music” to the miscarriage Don Giovanni had suffered at the hands of Rubini and company, during the first St. Petersburg Italian season.⁸⁹ But frustrations and discouragements of a more personal kind also contributed to his changed attitude. Glinka was the first Russian composer to experience directly the unfortunate effects of Tsar Nikolai’s arts policies. In 1849, Frezzolini had wished to sing Antonida in A Life for the Tsar at her bénéfice but was prevented from doing so by the edict that had just come down banning performances of Russian works by the Italian troupe (“Gloire à M. Tolstoi!” poor Glinka muttered in his memoirs,⁹⁰ referring to the composer of the work whose fiasco precipitated the decree). This meant that Russia’s premier composer was deprived by Nikolai’s frankly discriminatory policies of the kind of lavish production and first-class vocal talent that only the Italian Opera could then provide. Being treated like a second-class musical citizen in his own country deeply wounded him, contributed to the creative block that plagued him in his last decade, and caused him forever to associate the Italian Opera with what he saw as his own failed career. According to his sister, Glinka left Russia for the last time in 1856 spitting on the ground and hoping “never to see this vile country again.”⁹¹

Dargomïzhsky, Glinka’s younger contemporary, had even better reason to feel this way. His career was dogged from the outset by the favoritism shown the Italian Opera in Russia. Having completed his first opera, Esmeralda, in 1839 (to the libretto Victor Hugo had prepared from Notre-Dame de Paris around 1831 for Louise Berlin), he waited eight full years for its production by the Imperial Theaters. By the time the bureaucratic (i.e., censorship) formalities had been cleared, the Italians had come to town, and, as we learn from an agonized letter from Serov to Stasov (14 September 1844), “until the craze for the Italians is past, [Intendant Alexander] Gedeonov will not accept any opera from anyone for anything on any terms, on account of which Dargomïzhsky has received a point-blank refusal.”⁹²

The reason for Serov’s agony was the refusal, by Vladimir Zotov, the son of the director of repertoire under Gedeonov and a successful playwright, even to consider collaborating with Serov on an operatic project in view of the production embargo. As for Esmeralda, it finally saw the light of day in 1847—but only in Moscow, during the Russian Opera’s “exile.” Dargomïzhsky’s opera had its St. Petersburg première in 1851, twelve years after its submission. As the composer relates in an autobiographical sketch, Tamburini tried to secure it for his bénéfice at the Bolshoy; but as in the case of Frezzolini and A Life for the Tsar, he was refused on account of the 1849 ban.⁹³

As Dargomïzhsky’s late, notoriously slogan-filled letters attest, his attraction to the extreme notions of musical realism for which he is best remembered today was in large measure a ferment of sour grapes. In any case, his recorded opinions of Italian music are even more condescending than the norm. In an 1844 letter to his father from Paris, after a number of detailed descriptions of French operas he had chanced to see, there is this addendum: “At the Théátre des Italiens I also heard Linda di Chamounix by Donizetti. About this there is nothing much to say. First of all, you’ll hear it in St. Petersburg; but second, once a medal or a coin has been stamped out and described, is there any need to describe the next medal or coin that issues from the same die and the same machine?”⁹⁴

Alexander Serov, for his part, maintained an unswerving, quite unapologetic loyalty to Rossini throughout his career as critic, even if he did feel the need indirectly to admit its irrationality. He closed a warm obituary tribute to the Swan of Pesaro by invoking Montaigne: “There you have my opinion; I do not offer it as good, all I can say is that it is mine.” To which he added, with telltale defiance, “If I may be permitted on this occasion to alter Montaigne’s words a bit, I would say: “There you have my opinion of Rossini. I find that it is correct and doubt whether anyone can prove to me that it is not.”⁹⁵

To proclaim an admiration for Rossini—by way of exception—was a common tactic among Russian critics of Italian opera in the latter nineteenth century. (Not that such an admission was necessarily insincere: Vladimir Stasov, the flagrantly partisan tribune of Glinka and the Five, was incautious enough to have asserted in an early article, written in the throes of infatuation with Frezzolini and published—five years after Ruslan and Lyudmilal—in 1847, that “II Barbiere di Siviglia [was] the best opera of the first half of the nineteenth century.” Luckily for his later reputation, the article was unsigned.)⁹⁶ Admitting to a love of Rossini lent credence to one’s dismissal of his successors, particularly the Italian standard-bearer of the 1850s, whom Serov was pleased to greet as follows:

In the case of Verdi’s operas it seems to us that their posters are never printed as they should be. Whether in Ernani or in / Lombardi the leading character is not the one listed on the poster. The leading character is the big bass drum and its allies, the copper cymbals, followed by the chorus (unison) and only then Charles V, Ernani, or whoever, in the order listed.⁹⁷

The sole merit Serov was willing to grant the Italian Opera was its role in the development of musical taste, that is, of lay connoisseurship.⁹⁸ (Similarly, Mily Balakirev—admittedly not a composer of opera and so not in direct competition with the Italians—allowed that the Italian Opera was “the best school for Russian singers.”)⁹⁹ Other critics, even those known for their conservatism, disputed this. Herman Laroche (1845-1904), a critic of the next generation famous for his hostility to the modern music of his day, saw the Italian Opera nevertheless as a brake, a closer of the public ear. Even in a period of decline, he wrote in 1874, Italian opera continued to hold the masses in thrall with an obsolescent repertoire, crudely sung. Unlike most critics, Laroche gave the credit for this accomplishment not to the star singers but to the composers who established the genre’s hegemony in the 1840s, whose expert yet cynical creative methods he compared with those of the French “roman-industrie” as exemplified by such perennially popular authors as Dumas père or Eugène Sue: “The reason [for its success] lies in the music itself, in the powerful talent of its composers, but above all in their smartly calculated, adroitly implemented, purely practical methods, in their thorough knowledge of the listener in all his weaknesses and cravings.”¹⁰⁰

Particular interest attaches to the way in which César Cui—in an ambitious general survey of contemporary operatic schools dating from 1864, the year of his critical debut—attempted quasi-technically to analyze for his readers the ways and means of Italian opera, and justify his contempt for it. At the time of writing, Cui was still very close to Balakirev and the other members of the original Five, and his early critical pieces reflected the discussions that animated the meetings of the circle that would eventually produce Boris Godunov, Prince Igor, and Snegurochka. The strong idealist bent already encountered in the writings of Odoyevsky, with its rigid opposition of spirit and sensuality, may still be observed in Cui; but now it is cast in terms of a musical dichotomy, that between harmony (German) and melody (Italian). While a somewhat hackneyed distinction, what makes it noteworthy is the extreme confidence with which Cui constructs an idiosyncratic hierarchy of musical elements in accordance with an unstated—and unmusical—agenda:

A musical idea consists of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Of these three elements the most important is harmony (i.e., the combination of several tones with one another) because of its rich variety and the profound impression it makes on the listener. In melody (the succession of tones one after another) there can be no great variety. They all consist of the same twelve tones; all possible sequences of these tones have long since been exhausted. A great multitude of melodies have been written; it would be impossible to create a new one. Salvation must be sought in harmony and in working-out, i.e., the gradual development of musical ideas. It is precisely these last-named elements that the Italians have failed to cultivate at all. Their harmony hardly goes beyond those chords that any amateur might pick out at the piano or on the guitar.

There is even less development of musical ideas among the Italians than there is beauty of harmony. They have not the slightest idea of working-out. Italian music has barricaded itself behind some kind of Chinese wall. It neither knows nor wants to know what is going on on the outside. It is entirely satisfied with self-congratulation. The present trend in German music is entirely alien and unknown to it. Development of musical ideas it calls “erudition” and in its helplessness to aspire to it scorns it and brands it dry. That is why Italian operas, consisting entirely of melodies and devoid of harmonic interest or any development at all, are so extremely boring and monotonous. Once you know two, you know them all.

Quod erat demonstrandum! The upshot of this description (which goes on to charge Italian opera with stereotyped forms, disregard for the meaning of the text, hackneyed and noisy orchestration, and, above all, neglect of recitative, the chief bee in Cui’s bonnet) is that “for a cultivated musician Italian opera hardly exists.” The main focus of attack now shifts to the audience and its darlings. Here Cui’s arguments are less original, but he does make an accurate prediction:

The audience for Italian opera consists not of music lovers but of lovers of singing who all unawares confuse the two. I’ll go further yet: most of these gentlemen don’t even care about singing. They’d rather just hear beautiful vocal sounds, perfectly executed roulades. A single high note seized by Tamberlik, a scale sung by Fioretti transports them into the same ecstasy as any aria, with this difference only, that in the aria there are more scales and high notes. Maintaining the Italian opera costs the Imperial Theaters enormous sums. Doing away with the Italian opera would be beneficial to the development of the public taste, for Italian music is a form of stagnation. . . . But in spite of everything, doing away with the Italian opera will be impossible until we have our own singers of equal quality. It is hard to demand of a dilettante that he forgo the charms of good performance or persuade him that the beauties of a really worthy work of art can survive a bad one. We do not consider the lovers of Italian music to be incapable of enjoying a less superficial kind of music, so long as it may be heard in a good performance. Then they will see that melody and passion are not the sole property of the Italians, that in other schools they also exist and are even more expressive and profound.¹⁰¹

Having indicted Italian music as stagnant, and having therefore specifically denied Verdi any essential novelty vis-à-vis his more decorous predecessors, Cui wonders what kind of a future such an art (and such an artist) might possibly have. Twenty-five years later he had an answer: “Don Carlos, Aida, Otello represent the progressive collapse of Verdi’s creative powers even as they testify to a progressive turn in the direction of new forms, founded upon criteria of dramatic truth” such as enlightened anti-Italianate critics like Cui had been demanding all along.¹⁰² Italian opera, in short, could improve only at the cost of its own destruction as a distinctive genre.

The other members of the Five had little to add to this analysis. As long as the Italian Opera troupe enjoyed its official support, their public face was, and could only be, one of implacable idealistic opposition. Their private predilections could be less predictable. Borodin’s memoir of his first glimpse of the young (indeed, teenaged) Musorgsky showed him “extraordinarily polite and well-bred. The ladies were making a fuss over him. He sat at the piano and, coquettishly throwing up his hands, played excerpts from Trovatore, Traviata, etc. very sweetly while the circle around him buzzed in chorus: ‘charm-ant, délicieux!’ and so on.”¹⁰³ (Borodin himself, it seems, knew Il Barbiere di Siviglia by heart and could regale companions with it at the piano to their hearts’ content.)¹⁰⁴ Stravinsky, whose father often shared the concert platform with Musorgsky, recalled being told by his parents that the composer of Boris Godunov “was a connoisseur of Italian operatic music and that he accompanied concert singers in it extremely well.”¹⁰⁵

After 1885, when Italian opera had ceased to be an aggravated political issue in Russia, one could afford to relax a bit. Thus Vasiliy Yastrebtsev, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Boswell, recorded an evening’s conversation in 1893 in which “Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, Glazunov and [the music publisher] Belyayev had talked about the Italian composers. How surprised (perhaps even indignant!) the followers of the New Russian school would have been to hear their idols unanimously extol Verdi and Rimsky-Korsakov praise Donizetti, particularly Lucial In the view of Nikolai Andreyevich, Donizetti was not only extremely gifted; his style of composing had a special elegance which set him apart from the others.”¹⁰⁶ By then St. Petersburg had heard the work of Ponchielli (La Gioconda and / Lituani had figured in the last seasons of the Italian Opera, and Gioconda had been part of the Maryinsky repertoire since 1888), as well as the veristi (Manon Lescaut and Cav-&-Pag had their premières in 1893), and the conversation Yastrebtsev recorded doubtless expressed a measure of unexpected nostalgia.

THE RECEPTION of Italian opera among the literary and the politically active intelligentsia was quite another story. We have already noted Pushkin’s purely epicurean delight in Rossini, and there were many like him. Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48), one of the founders of Russian utilitarian aesthetics and hence the opposite of an epicurean, was carried away in spite of himself by Rubini. During the latter’s spring tour in 1843, Belinsky went to every performance of Lucia, and wrote to Vasily Botkin, his intellectual confidante, that Rubini was

a terrifying artist. In the third act I wept such tears as I had not wept in many a year. I’m going again to hear it today. The scene where he tears the ring away from Lucia and calls upon heaven to witness her perfidy is fearful, horrible. . . . I realized that all the arts have the same laws. Heavens, what a sobbing voice—so much feeling, such a flaming lava of feeling erupts from him, it is enough to drive you mad.¹⁰⁷

For some it was a guilty pleasure. The poet and critic Apollon Grigoryev ( 1822-64) proclaimed at length his inability to understand his own preference for Lucia over Ruslan.¹⁰⁸ But there was another dimension to the Italian opera’s popularity with the “thinking” public. In order to understand it we must take into account a curious and seldom-reported fact, stated most succinctly by Prince Kropotkin. Writing of his school years in the 1850s, which happened to coincide with the heyday of the Italian Opera as a Russian institution, he recalled that it was

in some strange way intimately connected with the radical movement, and the revolutionary recitatives in Guillaume Tell and I Puritani were always met with stormy applause and vociferations which went straight to the heart of Alexander II; while in the sixth-story galleries, and in the smoking room of the opera, and at the stage door the best part of the St. Petersburg youth came together in a common idealist worship of a noble art. All this may seem childish; but many higher ideas and pure inspirations were kindled by this worship of our favorite artists.¹⁰⁹

No other theater could offer such an outlet for forbidden sentiment, least of all the Russian opera as it was then; for the Russian opera, despite the view propagated by the historiography of a later time, was a politically ultraconservative institution. A Life for the Tsar, its linchpin, was the very epitome of the Nikolaian doctrine of “Official Nationality,” as we have seen, celebrating the blimpish trinity of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Patriotism. (Just compare that with Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité!) The later national school, as exemplified by Serov, Balakirev, Chaikovsky, Cui, and (increasingly) Musorgsky, was equally wedded to reactionary political ideals. Of all the famous Russian composers, only Rimsky-Korsakov could be fairly called a “liberal,” and even he did not show his colors until 1905. Meanwhile, at the Italian Opera, to quote the memoirs of another old enthusiast:

Ovations were especially strong when they gave some slight pretext for hints of what then passed for a liberal drift. Tamberlik would be forced to repeat the phrase “Cercar la libertà!” in Guillaume Tell three and even five times. Later on Graziani and Angiolini would have a similar success with the duet in Puritani that ends with the words “Gridando libertà!”¹¹⁰

Even Cui, staunch military man that he was, looked back indulgently on these demonstrations, calling them “an innocent manifestation of sixties liberalism.”¹¹¹ But they were more than that. As long as the radical students of the 1850s and 1860s could congregate in the passages and the uppermost gallery of the Bolshoy Theater and, standing in what Kropotkin called “a Turkish bath atmosphere,” shout their approval of Tamberlik or Angiolini, they could enjoy a sense of solidarity that was barred to them in any other sphere of Russian public life. Nowhere but at the Tsar’s own Italian Opera, in other words, did Russian radicals have the right of assembly.

Just as important, the Italian opera was the one form of theater in which everyone, from titled nobleman to anarchist, could find something on which to fasten with enthusiasm. Vol’f, looking back on this time from the politically turbulent 1870s, wrote with quaint nostalgia of the palmy days of the early Italian seasons, when everyone took pleasure in the opera side by side, albeit each in his own way. “In our time such a universal enthusiasm would be unthinkable,” he sighed. “One must take into account that in those days there were no social factions [!], and thus the intellectual elite lived through literature and the arts alone.”¹¹² Though the case as he makes it is far overstated, Vol’f was correct to point out that the Italian Opera was a potent unifier of the social fabric in midcentury Russia. This was at once something useful to those concerned with maintaining the social status quo, and something precious if illusory to those concerned with overthrowing it. Hence the intense nostalgia for the Italian Opera in its golden age that informs so many memoirs of Grand Duke and anarchist alike, and hence the myriad evocations of those magic evenings that inform so many passages in the works of Russian authors, be they reactionary or radical.

A case in point as concerns the radical faction is Nikolai Chernïshevsky, often taken for the prototype of the “nihilist” Bazarov in Fathers and Children, Turgenev’s famous novel of “social factions.” Chernïshevsky’s discussion of music in his early utilitarian-realist tract The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality is revealing. Even as he condemns “artificial singing” (his term for art music) by comparison to the “natural singing” of folk music, it is clear that all his notions of the former are based on Italian opera, the only kind of art music with which he was familiar, and which thus became for him the paradigm of musical artistry (“deliberate, calculated, embellished with everything with which human genius can embellish it”). Chernïshevsky has no conception whatever of instrumental music (for idealists, the higher kind). His “proof” of the superiority of vocal music was worthy of the Bolshoy parterre: “as soon as the singing starts, we cease to pay attention to the orchestra.”¹¹³

In What Is to Be Done?—his notorious novel of 1863 advocating free love—Chernïshevsky has his heroine, Vera Pavlovna, fall asleep musing angrily at having missed La Traviata owing to her lover’s negligence: “. . . as if he didn’t know that when Bosio is singing you can’t get two-ruble tickets at eleven o’clock! . . . I’d go to the opera every night, even to something bad, as long as Bosio were singing.” On falling asleep she dreams of meeting Bosio (strangely mixed at first with the contralto De Meric, who often sang Maddalena to Bosio’s Gilda in Rigoletto). The singer performs a romance to words by Pushkin (“But where did Bosio find the time to learn Russian?”), urging Vera Pavlovna on to the enjoyment of love. For Chernïshevsky, then, it was Bosio who, bringing Violetta to life with her art, symbolized the licentious sentiments to which Verdi’s heroine gives voice in the first act, sentiments from which the Russian radical sought to purge all moral stigma. Bosio, who like Viardot enhanced her popularity by giving free concerts for students,¹¹⁴ did her unwitting bit to encourage radical interpretations like this, as Viardot had done before her.

Yet there were limits. Viardot’s success with the students had been her undoing in Russia. Her biographer leaves it an unexplained mystery why the great singer did not return to St. Petersburg for the season 1853-54 (or any time thereafter), despite having announced plans to do so.¹¹⁵ Vol’f reveals that she had in fact been banned for having “excessively electrified the youth.”¹¹⁶ And that is why the hopelessly smitten Ivan Turgenev had to pursue her through the length and breadth of Europe. Turgenev, though his involvement with the Italian Opera thus had a special personal intensity, can stand here for that class of Russian littérateurs on the right who admired it as a representative of high aristocratic and “universal” (read: cosmopolitan) culture that put the pretensions of all merely local composers everlastingly to shame. Unremittingly hostile to the Russian national school, Turgenev satirized it in a number of his novels (On the Eve, Smoke) and allowed himself to become embroiled in endless controversy with Stasov, its great tribune, on account of his unregenerate opinions, particularly as regarded Dargomïzhsky’s last opera, The Stone Guest (after Pushkin).

This was an opera written programmatically and polemically against every Italianate tradition and for that reason the great hobbyhorse of the “New Russian school.” Defending himself against Stasov’s insinuation that he remained faithful to outmoded forms of art merely out of submission to authority, Turgenev affirmed delight in the old “recitatives and arias not because authorities praise them but because at the first sound of them my tears begin to flow. And it is not authorities that compel my contempt for your Stone Guest, which I had the patience to sit through not once but twice, and in no ‘doubtful’ rendition but in a masterly traversal of the vocal score. ... It will ever remain one of the great mysteries of my life how intelligent people like you and Cui . . . can find in these pitiful peeps and chirps—what? not just music, but a work of genius that will usher in ‘a new era of music’!!?!! Really now, is this not just unconscious chauvinism?”¹¹⁷

Another Russian writer who strongly favored Italian opera was the famous playwright Alexander Ostrovsky; his often stormy relations with the many Russian composers who were attracted by his work could be (in fact, have been) the subject of an interesting book.¹¹⁸ What made relations stormy was the frequent divergence of viewpoint between the librettist, who despite his reputation as a “progressive” writer and a connoisseur of folklore was eager to transform his plays into vehicles for Italianate vocalism, and the composers with whom he worked, who were of course mostly hostile to any such idea. For this reason Ostrovsky’s collaborations with Chaikovsky and Serov were notable fiascos; the composer with whom he got on best was Vladimir Kash-perov (1826-94), the outstanding (and practically the only) Russian emulator of the Italian school in the latter nineteenth century, and Ostrovsky made something of a laughingstock of himself for pushing Kashperov’s work so strenuously with unsympathetic Russian conductors.¹¹⁹

ECHOES

Before A Life for the Tsar there were no true Russian operas. Russians like Berezovsky and Bortnyansky had composed Italian operas in the eighteenth century, but these were composed on Italian soil and performed only in Italy. Opera performed in Russia to Russian texts (even if composed by Cavos) meant only singspiels or comédies mêlées d’ariettes.¹²⁰ Echoes of Italian opera entered Russian music at first through song. It was the work of the “three Alexanders”—romance composers Alyabyev (1787-1851), Varlamov (1801-48) and Gurilyov (1803-58)—who truly “mingled the Russian mélos and the reigning Italianism with the most carefree and charming ease,” as Stravinsky put it of a later composer,¹²¹ and in so doing laid the stylistic foundations on which the operas of Glinka would be erected. Curious reminiscences of Italian opera can also be found in some of the early printed collections of Russian folk songs with accompaniments—for example, those of Daniyil Kashin (1833) and Ivan Rupin (1831, published under the name “Rupini”)—where the melismata of the so-called “drawn-out song” (pro-tyazhnaya pesnya) are rendered in a fashion distinctly redolent of Italianate fioritura. This hybridized style persisted in Russian romances throughout the century, and produced a real masterpiece in Chaikovsky’s “Was I Not a Blade of Grass?” (Ya li v polye da ne travushka bïla?), Op. 47, no. 7.

The style of the Italianized protyazhnaya underlies the roles of both of Glinka’s operatic heroines—Antonida and Lyudmila—and may be savored at its height of expressivity in the trio Ne tomi, rodimiy (“Do Not Grieve, Beloved”) in the first act of A Life for the Tsar, the number Balakirev so successfully arranged for piano. In Ruslan and Lyudmila, Italian styles are used as elements of characterization. The noble title pair have extended solo numbers (Lyudmila’s act 1 cavatina, Ruslan’s act 2 aria) that go through Italianate progressions of tempos and in Lyudmila’s case entail a high level of virtuosity. (Viardot smuggled Lyudmila’s cavatina into the Bolshoy kamenniy theater by interpolating it into the Barbiere lesson scene in 1852.) Farlaf, Ruslan’s ridiculous rival, has a rondo (act 2) in purest buffo style, created for Tosi. Buffo patter-singing—in Russian, skorogovorka—modeled on Farlaf would remain a stock item for basses in Russian comic operas like Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night or Chaikovsky’s Vakula the Smith, both after Gogol; it was thus indirectly the Italian opera’s most enduring legacy for Russia. A resonance of a more specific kind occurs in the first act of Ruslan: a quartet in canonic style (Kakoye chudnoye mgnovenye, “What Uncanny Flash?”) following upon Lyudmila’s abduction, modeled directly on “Fredda ed immobile,” from Il Barbiere. In turn it provided the model for a similarly motivated ensemble in the third-act finale from Chaikovsky’s The Oprichnik (1873).

Except for out-and-out imitators like Aleksey Lvov, F. Tolstoy, and Kash-perov, there is no later Russian composer of opera whose Italianate borrowings are as plain as Glinka’s. The Francophile Dargomïzhsky was as indifferent to Rossini and Co. as he would later be to Wagner. It is an oft-noted paradox that Alexander Serov began writing his first completed opera, Judith, to an Italian text prepared at his request by one Ivan Antonovich Giustiniani, an improvisatore resident in St. Petersburg. But that is to be explained as a matter of ambition rather than stylistic or aesthetic affinity. Serov wanted his opera to be performed by the stellar international cast of the St. Petersburg Italian Opera, and thence to be exported to western Europe. Dissuaded at first by the refusal of Emma Lagrua to sing the title role, and finally by the inflexible ban on performances of native works by the Italian troupe, he reworked the opera to a Russian text. Only two spots in the finished opera give any evidence of Italianism. One is the final hymn of praise (act 5), where the triumphant heroine rejoices in virtuosic roulades. The other is ironic: Judith makes her seductive and insincere appeal to Holofernes in act 3 by means of a sly parody of Bellinian melody.

Serov’s next opera, Rogneda, contained a sugary part (Ruald) written for Fyodor Nikolsky (1828-98), a Milan-trained tenor whose extraordinary vocal powers did much in the 1860s to enhance public esteem for the Russian opera. Nikolsky was widely compared with Tamberlik, and for exploiting the singer’s prowess Serov found himself accused of hypocrisy and (what was worse) banality. Thus Cui:

To each his own: our public loves Italian melodies. Fine. There’s no blaming Mr. Serov for writing them. But what is altogether no good is the routine Italian construction of his melodies. . . . And after the end of the duet, piano, we get a final B—the crudest trick in the book for getting the audience to applaud. Mr. Serov himself affects to despise Cs. But the whole difference is only that Sgr. Tamberlik has a C, and all Mr. Nikolsky has is a B.¹²²

Elsewhere Cui commented on the general tendency of Serov’s development by sneering, “After Judith Mr. Serov wrote Rogneda—good. But when after Rogneda he finally writes La Traviata, only then will his genius achieve its full wingspread.”¹²³ “Italianism,” for the likes of Cui, had become merely a generalized term or mode of abuse.

And it was misplaced. The intense cultivation of historical drama by playwrights and composers alike in the 1870s ensured that the prime Western model for Russian opera would be French. Serov thought of himself as a Wagnerian, but no one can fail to see that his model of (perhaps unconscious) choice was Meyerbeer. Chaikovsky’s operatic output is specifically Gallic at all levels of style and tone, from the grand Scribian extravaganza (The Oprichnik, The Maid of Orleans) to the more modest scale endemic to the Théátre Lyrique (Eugene Onegin, Iolanta). For him the Italian opera was decidedly passé as a source of style or a model of procedure (as it remained for Rimsky-Korsakov, who only really hit his stride as a composer of operas in the 1890s).

There is, however, one fascinating Italianate resonance in Chaikovsky—fascinating for its indirectness. Along with the rest of musical St. Petersburg, Chaikovsky, then an impressionable conservatory pupil, attended the glamorous première production of La Forza del Destino, and it is not surprising to find an echo of Verdi’s overture, with its sledgehammer symbolism, in Chaikovsky’s earliest symphonic poem, Fatum, the very title of which resonates with the title of the famous opera. Verdi’s muttering flat-sixth reminiscence motif punctuates Chaikovsky’s lyrical theme to the same semantic effect, albeit not as a within-the-work (“introversive”) reminiscence but as an “intertextual” one (examples 10.1a-b). After Chaikovsky destroyed this youthful effort (posthumously reconstructed from parts and published in 1896), he cannibalized the lyric theme in the climactic duet for the star-crossed lovers in The Oprichnik, an opera very much concerned with the force of destiny (example 10.1c). Thus Verdi’s opera continued to reverberate in Chaikovsky’s, but only through a symphonic intermediary, and “semantically” rather than stylistically.

It has been claimed that Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov owes a specific debt to La Forza del Destino for character models: Varlaam/Melitone, Idiot/Trabuco.¹²⁴ Yet the characters in question were both present in the Pushkin play from which Musorgsky’s libretto closely derived. On the other hand, the opening of the Scene at the Fountain (act 3, scene 1) in the second version of Musorgsky’s opera, where the False Dmitri unaccountably sings Pushkin’s stage directions (“Midnight ... in the garden ... by the fountain”) in a fashion much ridiculed by littérateurs at the time, may well be an unconscious echo of the opening of the third act of Don Carlos (“A mezza notte, ai giardin della Regina, sotto gli allor della fonte vicina”), which had had its St. Petersburg première precisely when Musorgsky was beginning work on Boris. Even here, though, the resonance is textual, not musical. Yet it is not inconceivable that Verdi’s example helped wean Musorgsky from the extremist-realist incubator in which his talent had, in somewhat one-sided fashion, been nurtured. Though a good “kuchkist” would have been loath to admit it, Verdi may thus have played a significant part in leading Musorgsky to the “rough and gaudy theatricality”¹²⁵ that has ensured his opera’s survival as a world classic when so much of the Russian radical purism that provided its immediate environment has passed into history.

At the other extreme, the self-declared Russian Italianists have also been forgotten. The only one worth recalling here is Kashperov, Ostrovsky’s favorite. A protégé of Glinka’s, Kashperov studied with his mentor’s mentor, Siegfried Dehn, in Berlin but gravitated afterward to Italy, where he lived for eight years (1857 to 1865) and had three operas produced: Maria Tudor, on a text by Ghislanzoni (Milan, 1859); Rienzi, to his own translation of Wagner’s libretto (Florence, 1863); Consuelo, after George Sand (Venice, 1865). These were the first operas by a Russian produced in Italy since the eighteenth century. Kashperov returned to Russia at Nikolai Rubinstein’s invitation, to join the faculty of the newly formed Moscow Conservatory, where he was professor of singing from 1866 to 1872. It was in Moscow that he joined forces with Ostrovsky, whom he had met several years before in Italy. The playwright eagerly arranged his own most famous and most “typically Russian” work, The Storm (Groza), as a numbers libretto for Kashperov to set in his wonted Italian (pre-Verdian) manner. The opera was produced at the Mariyinsky in 1867. Serov, who was about to embark on a collaboration of his own with Ostrovsky that would result, after many vicissitudes, in his third opera, The Power of the Fiend (Vrazhya sila), reviewed The Storm with what must seem unbelievable tactlessness to anyone unfamiliar with the general tenor of nineteenth-century Russian journalism:

EXAMPLE 10.1

a. Verdi, Overnare to La Forza del Destino, figure C

b. Chaikovsky, Fatum, eight bars after figure 3

c. Chaikovsky, The Oprichnik, act 4, Duet, nineteen bars after figure 70

Whether it was the result of the hoary prejudice that an operatic canvas must remain far removed from dramaturgical criteria and automatically debase any subject it touches, or whether it was the desire to match the text to the capabilities of the composer, or yet whether it was because of his own Italianate predilections and inspiration, the fact remains that A. N. Ostrovsky has weakened his play enormously in adapting his text for the opera, and has hardly helped the cause of serious operatic standards in so doing.¹²⁶

The standards Serov had in mind, it goes without saying, were those of realism as then understood in Russia, and which may be boiled down to a Chernïshevskian aphorism: “Emotion and form are opposites.”¹²⁷ Instead of “form,” great specificity of time and (national) location were prized and striven for. Ostrovsky’s goals were different; he had in fact skillfully adapted his dramatic structure to the demands of Italian operatic form, confident that the musical scale thus achieved would heighten emotional intensity sufficiently to compensate for the attendant loss in dramatic motivation and subtlety. The story was stripped down to the love intrigue, which, denuded of its social and cultural milieu (which today will inevitably strike the reader as the play’s most essential component), is reduced to a typical (that is, “universal”) triangle of fickle woman, spineless paramour, and ridiculous cuckold. Several roles—including Kabanova, the heroine’s mother-in-law, often viewed by literary critics as the play’s central character—are virtually eliminated. (Kuligin, the “conscience” of the play, is replaced by the chorus.)

In fashioning the libretto, Ostrovsky sought to gather into big arias the individual, scattered speeches and admissions of the lovers Boris and Katerina. Thus the opera begins right off (except for a conventional genre chorus) with an aria by Boris in which he sets forth at length his hopeless love for Katerina, which in the play is revealed gradually in dialogues and soliloquies spread over two acts. Katerina’s two scenes with her friend Varvara, one before and one after her husband’s departure in the play, are combined in the opera into one enormous scena that begins the second act (thus balancing Boris’s aria in the first). These numbers are broadly set, Italian-style, in a sequence of increasingly rapid tempos.

The other main ploy in constructing the libretto was to end each of the four acts with an ensemble finale. The first act of the play, which offered no such possibility, was pretty much cut. The first act of the opera ends with the departure of Tikhon, Katerina’s husband (act 2 in the play). Ostrovsky constructed a long farewell scene centering around Tikhon’s parting words to each of five characters in turn: a series of little linked duets that in Kashperov’s setting conform to what Glinka had once sarcastically described as “typical Italian” sar Cui did his best, as critic, to write off the work of “Il signor maestro Kasperoff” as a joke.¹²⁹ Serov, in greater detail, and with characteristic humorlessness, made a similar point. Kashperov, in his description, “belongs to the category of ‘naïve’ composers: for him an opera is a collection of vocal pieces and ditties à la Donizetti et Pacini, accompanied by an orchestra à la Donizetti et Pacini; and the libretto exists for the purpose of somehow motivating the arias, duets, and so on for the prima donna, the contralto, the tenor, and the baritone.” Such music and such a dramaturgy, he went on, “is just as appropriate as the song of the Volga boatmen would be in Lucrezia Borgia” As for the playwright/librettist’s own participation in the venture, “If A.N. Ostrovsky has given up one of his best creations to serve such an enterprise, that is his own affair. That from an opera written with such ideals nothing could come but a profanation of his play, is once again as clear as day.”¹³⁰ One could scarcely hope to find a better or more typical delineation of “literary” vs. “musical” thinking on the subject of opera in nineteenth-century Russia. Audiences by 1867 seemed to be tending toward Serov’s line; Kashperov’s opera did not enter the Mariyinsky repertory.

As a postscript we may cite what appears to be the very last instance of a Russian composer of any stature adopting an Italian model for opera: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Aleko (1892), written as a graduation exercise from Moscow Conservatory to an assigned text by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, based on Pushkin’s long narrative poem “The Gypsies” (Tsïganï). It so happens that Kashperov had also written his first, heavily Italianate, opera on the same romantic subject some forty years earlier (the libretto was by the revolutionary writer Nikolai Ogaryov—further testimony to the strange predilection Russian radical thinkers had for Italian or Italianate opera). That opera had never been staged, and there was no chance Rachmaninoff could have known it. But everybody in Moscow knew and was talking about Cavalleria rusticana, which had its first performances there in 1891 and was revived just as Rachmaninoff set to work on Aleko. Geoffrey Norris has pointed up the extensive parallels between the two operas’ librettos.¹³¹ Rachmaninoff even inserted an orchestral intermezzo to accompany the breaking of the dawn, corresponding exactly (and gratuitously) with Mascagni’s famous “Intermezzo sinfonico.”

By and large, it is clear that Russian composers practiced what they preached where Italian opera was concerned. An account of the echoes of German or (especially) French opera in the work of Russian composers would be many times the length of this one. The reason was as much a matter of timing as one of aesthetics. The rise of the Russian opera had coincided with the decline of the Italian. And yet its very absence testifies to the importance of the Italian opera in defining, and constructing, the Russians’ musical samo-poznaniye, their sense of an art-musical self.

¹ Information in these paragraphs from Robert-Aloys Mooser, Annales de la Musique et des Musiciens en Russie au XVIIIme Siècle, vol. 3 (Geneva: Editions du Mont-Blanc, 1951); and Yuriy Keldïsh, “Opernïy teatr,” in Yury Vsevolodovich Keldïsh, Olga Yevgeniyevna Levashova, and Aleksey Ivanovich Kandinsky, eds., Istoriya russkoy muzïki, vol. 4 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1986), pp. 25-61 (also “Khronologicheskaya tablitsa,” pp. 354-406).

² Yakov S. Katsanov, “Iz istorii muzïka,rnoy kul’turï Odessï (1794-1855),” in Boris Solo-monovich Shteinpress, ed., Iz Muzïkal’nogo proshlogo: Sbornik ocherkov (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1960), pp. 393-459, esp. p. 407.

³ Ibid., p. 408.

⁴ J. Thomas Shaw, trans, and ed., The Letters of Alexander Pushkin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 136.

⁵ Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Pantheon, 1964), vol. 1, p. 343.

⁶ Katsanov, “Iz istorii muzïkal’noy kul’turï Odessï (1794-1855),” p. 412.

⁷ Ibid., p. 411.

⁸ See Tamara Nikolayevna Livanova and Vladimir Vasilyevich Protopopov, Opernaya kritika v Rossii, vol. 1, part 1 (Moscow: Muzika, 1966), p. 101.

⁹ See Katsanov, “Iz istorii Muzïka,l’noy kul’turï Odessï (1794-1855),” p. 410.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 420.

¹¹ Letters of Pushkin,

¹² Abram Akimovich Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1836-1856) (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1969), p. 660; Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoyevsky, Muzïkal no- Literaturnoye naslediye (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1956), p. 535.

¹³ Odoyevasky, Muzïkal no- Literaturnoye naslediye p. 87.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 95.

¹⁵ Alexander Ivanovich Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1 (St. Petersburg: tip. R. Golike, 1877), p. 20.

¹⁶ Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzika, 1973), p. 235.

¹⁷ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 23.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 26.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 29.

²⁰ Nicholas Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 360.

²¹ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 23.

²² Nikolai Findeyzen, ed., A. S. Dargomïzhskiy (1813-1869): Avtobiografiya-Pis’ ma-Vospominaniya sovremennikov (Peterburg: Gosudarstvennoye izdatel’stvo, 1921), p. 5.

²³ Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1836-1856), p. 712.

²⁴ Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1857-1872) (Leningrad: Muzika, 1971), p. 180.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 78.

²⁶ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 17.

²⁷ Anna Vorob’yova memoirs, quoted in Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1836-1856), pp. 751-52.

²⁸ Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Sochineniya i pis’ma (St. Petersburg: tip. Prosveshcheniye, 1896), vol. 7, p. 338.

²⁹ Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1836-1856), pp. 719-20.

³⁰ Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1857-1872), p. 101.

³¹ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 98.

³² Unsigned review in Panteon, quoted in Gozenpud, Russkiy operniy teatr XIX veka (1857-1872), vol. 2, p. 190.

³³ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 106.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Cf. ibid., p. 56.

³⁶ Severnaya pchela, 1843, no. 220; 1844, no. 249 (both quoted in Gozenpud, Russkiy operniy teatr XIX veka (1857-1872), vol. 2, p. 184).

³⁷ Za polveka, quoted in Tamara Livanova, Opernaya kritika v Rossii, vol. 2, part 3 (Moscow: Muzika, 1969), p. 153.

³⁸ “Iz moikh opernikh vospominaniy,” in César Cui, Izbrannïye stat’i (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1952), pp. 510-25, esp. pp. 512, 517.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 404.

⁴⁰ Alexander Nikitenko, quoted in Gozenpud, Russkiy operniy teatr XIX veka (1857-1872), p. 185.

⁴¹ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 107.

⁴² Ibid., p. 112.

⁴³ Quoted in Tamara Livanova, Opernaya kritika v Rossii, vol. 1, part 2 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1967), p. 66.

⁴⁴ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 112.

⁴⁵ Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1857-1872), p. 208n.

⁴⁶ Lyudmila Shestakova, “Posledniye godï zhizni i konchina Mikhaíla Ivanovicha Glinki,” quoted in Livanova, Opernaya kritika v Rossii, vol. 2, part 3, p. 12.

⁴⁷ Gozenpud, Russkiy operniy teatr XIX veka (1857-1872), p. 178.

⁴⁸ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 116.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 141.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 148.

⁵¹ Anton Rubinstein, “Avtobiograficheskiye rasskazï, 1829-1867/’ in Lev Aronovich Baren-boym, Anton Grigor’ yevich Rubinshteyn: Zhizri, artisticheskiy put’, tvorchestvo, muzïkal’no-obshchestvennaya deyatel’nost, vol. 1 (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1957), pp. 397-421, esp. p. 412.

⁵² Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 155.

⁵³ See the list in Viktor Adolfovich Bernatsky, “Iz zolotogo veka ital’yanskoy operï v Peter-burge,” Russkaya starina 168 (1916): 17-24, 276-83, 434-56, esp. pp. 279-80.

⁵⁴ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 2 (St. Petersburg: tip. R. Golike, 1877), p. 110.

⁵⁵ Alexander Serov, Izbrannïye stat’i, vol. 2 (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1957), p. 414.

⁵⁶ Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899), p. 119.

⁵⁷ Information in this paragraph from Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1857-1872), vol. 2, pp. 239-41.

⁵⁸ Livanova, Opernaya kritika v Rossii, vol. 2, part 3, p. 44.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 192.

⁶⁰ “Opernïy repertuar v S.-Peterburge,” Iskusstva, no. 2 (1860); quoted in ibid., part 4 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1973), p. 273.

⁶¹ Matvey Stepanovich Lalayev, “Ital’yanskaya opera v Peterburge,” Sovremennik 91 (January 1862), quoted in Livanova, Opernaya kritika v Rossii, vol. 2, part 3, pp. 298-99.

⁶² Moskovskiye vedomosti, no. 245 (9 November 1862); quoted in ibid., part 4, p. 305.

⁶³ A. Dmitriyeva, “Peterburgskaya opera Verdi,” Muzïkal’naya zhizn’, no. 8 (1988): 19-21, esp. p. 19.

⁶⁴ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1855 do nachala 1881 goda (St. Petersburg: tip. R. Golike, 1884), p. 118.

⁶⁵ Serov, Izbranriiye stat’i, vol. 2, p. 515.

⁶⁶ Cui, Izbranrïye stat’i, p. 148.

⁶⁷ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1855 do nachala 1881 goda, p. 121.

⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 123.

⁶⁹ Cui, Izbranrïye stat’i, p. 87.

⁷⁰ Ibid., p. 149.

⁷¹ Memoirs of a Revolutionist, pp. 119-20, 252.

⁷² Cui, Izbrannïye stat’i, p. 514.

⁷³ Ibid.

⁷⁴ P. I. Chaikovsky, Muzïkal’ no-kriticheskiye stat’i (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1986), p. 33.

⁷⁵ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1855 do nachala 1881 goda, p. 137.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 139.

⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 136.

⁷⁸ Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1873-1889) (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1973), p. 222.

⁷⁹ Chaikovsky, Muzïkal’no-khticheskiye stat’i, pp. 32-33.

⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 35.

⁸¹ Cited from Livanova and Protopopov, Opernaya kritika v Rossii, vol. 1, pp. 312-13.

⁸² “Russkaya ili ital’yanskaya opera,” in Odoyevsky, Muzïkal’no- Literaturnoye naslediye, p. 314.

⁸³ Eduard Stark, Peterburgskaya opera i yeyo mastera (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1940), p. 15.

⁸⁴ Odoyevsky, Muzïkal’no- Literaturnoye naslediye, p. 289.

⁸⁵ David Lowe, “Vladimir Odoevskii as Opera Critic,” Slavic Review 41, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 306-15, esp. p. 310.

⁸⁶ Quoted in David Brown, Glinka (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 80.

⁸⁷ Glinka, Memoirs, trans. Richard B. Mudge (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), p. 61.

⁸⁸ Ibid., pp. 176-77.

⁸⁹ Ibid., p. 180.

⁹⁰ Ibid., p. 217.

⁹¹ L. I. Shestakova, “Posledniye godï zhizhni i konchina Mikhaíla Ivanovicha Glinki,” in A. Orlova, ed., Glinka v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1955), p. 309.

⁹² “A. N. Serov, Pis’ma k V. V. i D. V. Stasovïm,” ed. Abram Akimovich Gozenpud and Vera Alekseyevna Obram, in Muzïkal’noe nasledstvo, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1962), pp. 65-312, 129.

⁹³ Findeyzen, A. S. Dargomïzhskiy (1813-1869), p. 6.

⁹⁴ Ibid., p. 16.

⁹⁵ Serov, Izbranrïye stat’i, vol. 2, p. 468.

⁹⁶ Stasov’s authorship was established on the basis of his correspondence with Serov: see Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1857-1872), pp. 178-79.

⁹⁷ A. N. Serov, Stat’i o muzïke, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzika, 1984), p. 85.

⁹⁸ Ibid., p. 82.

⁹⁹ Quoted in Bernatsky, “Iz zolotogo veka ital’yanskoy operï v Peterburge,” p. 17.

¹⁰⁰ Herman Laroche, lzbrannïye s tat’i, vol. 3 (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1976), p. 128.

¹⁰¹ Cui, Izbranrïye stat’i, pp. 32-34; emphases original.

¹⁰² Ibid., p. 415.

¹⁰³ Sergei Aleksandrovich Dianin, ed., Pis’ma A. P. Borodina, vol. 4 (Moscow and Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1950), p. 297.

¹⁰⁴ Serge Dianin, Borodin (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 25.

¹⁰⁵ Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), p. 45.

¹⁰⁶ Vasiliy Vasilyevich Yastrebtsev, Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov, ed. and trans. Florence Jonas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 47. Lucia, we learn from Rimsky-Korsakov’s posthumously published autobiography, had been a childhood favorite (My Musical Life, trans. Judah A. Joffe [London: Eulenberg, 1974], p. 12).

¹⁰⁷ Quoted in Livanova, Opernaya kritika v Rossii, vol. 1, part 2, p. 35. Turgenev commented that Belinsky’s infatuation with Rubini’s singing was born not of any musical appreciation but only in response to the tenor’s pathetic and dramatic qualities.

¹⁰⁸ See his article “Russkiy teatr” in Dostoyevsky’s journal Epokha (5 March 1864).

¹⁰⁹ Memoirs of a Revolutionist, p. 120.

¹¹⁰ Konstantin Skalkovsky, Vospominaniya molodosti (St. Petersburg, 1906), p. 113.

¹¹¹ Cui, Izbrannïye stat’i, p. 515.

¹¹² Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 107.

¹¹³ N. G. Chernïshevsky, Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), pp. 347, 348.

¹¹⁴ Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1873-1889), pp. 158-59; see also Cui, Izbrannïye stat’i, p. 514.

¹¹⁵ April FitzLyon, The Price of Genius (London: John Calder, 1964), pp. 299, 300.

¹¹⁶ Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1826 do nachala 1855 goda, part 1, p. 164. He also notes that Mario, a notorious philanderer, had been banned at the same time as a threat to public morals.

¹¹⁷ Letters of 15/27 March and 14/26 May 1872, printed in Stasov, “Dvadtsat’ pisem Tur-geneva i moyo znakomstvo s nim,” Severnïy vestnik, no. 10 (1888): 145-67, esp. pp. 166-67.

¹¹⁸ E. M. Kolosova and Vladimir Filippov, A. N. Ostrovskiy i russkiye kompozitorï (Moscow and Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1937).

¹¹⁹ Memoir by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov in Ostrovskiy i russkiye kompozitorï, p. 19.

¹²⁰ The best discussion of these musical plays may be found in Simon Karlinsky, Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), chapter 5 (“The Age of Catherine: Comic Opera and Verse Comedy”).

¹²¹ Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, bilingual ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 122. Stravinsky was speaking of Dargomïzhsky’s Rusalka.

¹²² César Cui, Muzïkal’ no-kriticheskiye stat’i, vol. 1 (Petrograd, 1918), p. 55.

¹²³ “Zhurnal’nïye tolki o ‘Rognede’ g. Serova,” Sankt-peterburgskiye vedomosti (1866), no. 14.

¹²⁴ Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 520. The most sustained attempt to establish a Verdian presence in Musorgsky is Robert W. Oldani’s in Caryl Emerson and Robert William Oldani, Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 235-39. See also R. John Wiley, “The Tribulations of Nationalist Composers: A Speculation Concerning Borrowed Music in Khovanshchina,” in Malcolm H. Brown, ed., Musorgsky: In Memo-riam, 1881-1981 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp. 163-77, where Marfa’s répliques in the “love requiem” in the fifth act of Khovanshchina are traced to Gilda’s “Lassù in cielo” from Rigoletto, act 3.

¹²⁵ Gozenpud, Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (1873-1889), vol. 3, p. 74.

¹²⁶ Serov, Izbrannïye stat’i, vol. 2, p. 73.

¹²⁷ Selected Philosophical Essays, p. 346.

¹²⁸ Reported by Serov in a letter to Stasov, 14 February 1843; Muzïkal’noe nasledstvo, vol. 1, p. 204. Observations on the Kashperov-Ostrovsky Groza are based on the separately published libretto (Moscow, 1867) and the piano score of Kashperov’s music (without voice), arr. Alexander Dubuque (Moscow: P. Jurgenson, n.d.).

¹²⁹ “Muzïkal’nïye zametki,” Sankt-peterburgskiye vedomosti, no. 304 (1867).

¹³⁰ Serov, Izbrannïye stat’i, vol. 2, pp. 76-77.

¹³¹ “Rakhmaninov’s Student Opera,” Musical Quarterly 59, no. 3 (July 1973): 441-48, esp. pp. 447-48.