Russian opera


Russian opera is the art of opera in Russia. Operas by composers of Russian origin, written or staged outside of Russia, also belong to this category, as well as the operas of foreign composers written or intended for the Russian scene. These are not only Russian-language operas. There are examples of Russian operas written in French, English, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, Japanese, or the multitude of languages of the nationalities that were part of the Empire and the Soviet Union.
Russian opera includes the works of such composers as Glinka, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Searching for its typical and characteristic features, Russian opera, has often been under strong foreign influence. Italian, French, and German operas have served as examples, even when composers sought to introduce special, national elements into their work. This dualism, to a greater or lesser degree, has persisted throughout the whole history of Russian opera.

18th century

Opera came to Russia in the 18th century. At first there were Italian language operas presented by Italian opera s. Later some foreign composers serving to the Russian Imperial Court began writing Russian-language operas, while some Russian composers were involved into writing of the operas in Italian and French. And only at the beginning of the 1770s were the first modest attempts of the composers of Russian origin to compose operas to the Russian librettos made. This was not a real creation of Russian national opera per se, but rather a weak imitation of Italian, French or German examples. But nevertheless, these experiments were important, and paved the way for the great achievements of 19th and 20th centuries.

Italians

Originating in Italy in c1600, opera spread all over Europe and reached Russia in 1731, when the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony August II the Strong 'loaned' his Italian opera troupe to the Russian Empress Anna for the celebration of her coronation in Moscow. The first opera shown in Russia was Calandro by Giovanni Alberto Ristori, performed in Moscow in 1731 under the direction of the composer and his father Tommaso, with 13 actors and nine singers including Ludovica Seyfried, Margherita Ermini and Rosalia Fantasia.
After that Italian opera troupes were welcomed to Russia for the entertaining of the Empress and her Court. In 1735 a big Italian opera troupe led by a composer Francesco Araja was invited for the first time to work in Saint Petersburg. The first opera given by them was Araja's La forza dell'amore e dell'odio, with a text by Francesco Prata, staged on 8 February , 1736 as Sila lyubvi i nenavisti.
Araja’s next two productions were the operas seria Il finto Nino, overo La Semiramide riconosciuta to the text by Francesco Silvani given on 9 February 1737 , Saint Petersburg and Artaserse to the text by Pietro Metastasio, performed on 9 February 1738 in Saint Petersburg. Araja spent around 25-year in Russia and wrote at least 14 operas for the Russian Court.
In 1742, in connection witho the celebration of the coronation of Empress Elizaveta Petrovna in Moscow the opera Tito Vespasiano by Johann Adolf Hasse was staged. A new theatre was built especially for this event. In 1743 at "Zimnij Dvorets", the in Saint Petersburg, instead of a small hall of "Comedie et opere" was built a new Opera House that held about a thousand persons.
by Araja, 1755
The next opera seria by Araja Seleuco, text by Giuseppe Bonecchi was given on 7 May , 1744 in Moscow as part of a double celebration of the anniversary of the coronation of Elizaveta Petrovna and conclusion of peace with Sweden.
The staging of Araja’s opera seria Bellerofonte, text by Giuseppe Bonecchi was notable for the participation of a Russian singer from "pevchie" of the Court Capella, Mark Poltoratski, who played the role of Ataman, a nobleman of Kingdom of Likia.
The first opera written in Russian was Araja’s Tsefal i Prokris that was staged at Saint Petersburg on 7 March, , 1755.
The second opera set to a Russian text was Alceste, 1758, libretto by Alexander Sumarokov) by German composer Hermann Raupach also serving to the Russian Court. Raupach spent 18 years in Russia and died in Saint Petersburg in 1778.
In 1757 a private opera enterprise directed by Giovanni Battista Locatelli was invited to Saint Petersburg. They had shown an opera every week for the court, and two-three times a week they were allowed to give open public performances. The repertoire was mostly of Italian opera buffa. For the first three years the troupe had presented the seven operas by Baldassare Galuppi including Il mondo della luna, Il Filosofo di campagna, and Il mondo alla roversa, ossia Le donne che commandono.
In the 1760–80s in Russia there were working in turn Venetian Galuppi, Manfredini from Pistoia, Traetta from Bitonto near Barri, Paisiello from Taranto, Sarti, Cimarosa from Campania, and Spaniard Martin y Soler. Each of them brought an important contribution, producing operas to the Italian as well as Russian libretti. Here are listed some of the operas written and premiered in Russia:
Vincenzo Manfredini spent 12 years in Russia and died in Saint Petersburg. The son and pupil of famous baroque composer Francesco Manfredini, he was a music teacher for Pavel Petrovich who later became Emperor of Russia. For the Russian Imperial Court Manfredini wrote five operas including: Semiramide, L'Olimpiade and Carlo Magno.
Tommaso Traetta was a maestro di cappella at the Russian Imperial Court for eight years, Antigone, and Le quattro stagioni e i dodici mesi dell'anno.
Giovanni Paisiello, a famous Neapolitan composer of more than 100 operas seria and buffa, he spent in Russia eight years, where he wrote 12 operas including Nitteti, Lucinda e Armidoro, Il barbiere di Siviglia, ovvero La precauzione inutile, and Il mondo della luna.
Giuseppe Sarti, a composer of about 40 operas, he spent in Russia eighteen years. After being for eight years a maestro di cappella at the Imperial Court, he spent the next four years at the service of Prince Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin at his estate in Southern Russia. Then he returned to the Court. In 1801 he solicited permission to return, because his health was broken. The emperor Alexander I dismissed him in 1802 with a liberal pension. Sarti died in Berlin. His most successful operas in Russia were Armida e Rinaldo and The Early Reign of Oleg, for the latter of which the empress herself wrote the libretto. Among the nine operas written in Russia are also: Gli amanti consolati, I finti eredi, Castore e Polluce and La famille indienne en Angleterre.
Domenico Cimarosa, another famous Neapolitan composer, singer, violinist, harpsichordist, conductor ant teacher, who composed about 75 operas, was a maestro di cappella in Russia for five years, where wrote: La felicità inaspettata, La vergine del sol'e and La Cleopatra
Vicente Martín y Soler a Spanish organist and composer of 21 operas and 5 ballets, he settled in Russia c1788, where he was called "Martini". He wrote there: Gore-Bogatyr Kosometovich with overture on three Russian tunes, Pesnolyubie, and La festa del villagio.
Two of his operas premiered in Vienna, but also staged in Russia, Una cosa rara, o sia Bellezza ed onestà and L'arbore di Diana were especially popular. The first of them performed in Russian translation of Ivan Dmitrievsky had some elements of the antifeudal directivity. He died in Saint Petersburg in January 1806.
Ivan Kerzelli was a representative of a big family of foreign musicians Kerzelli, settled in Russia in the 18th century. He is regarded as a composer of a few famous operas: Lyubovnik – koldun, Rozana i Lyubim, Derevenskiy vorozheya and Guljanye ili sadovnik kuskovskoy.
Antoine Bullant, another composer of Czech origin settled in Russia in 1780 wrote a large number of operas with Russian librettos, often within Russian national settings. He was especially famous for his comic opera Sbitenshchik, comic opera in 3 acts, written to the libretto by Yakov Knyazhnin. The opera was staged 1783 or 1784 in Saint Petersburg, at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre, and was played until 1853.
There were also extremely popular the operas by Belgian/French André Ernest Modeste Grétry, like L'Amitié à l'épreuve or Les Mariages samnites that was performed during 12 years with serf-soprano Praskovya Zhemchugova at the private opera of Nikolai Sheremetev.

Russians

Two talented young Russians Berezovsky and Bortniansky were sent by Catherine II to Italy to study art of music composition.
Maksym Berezovsky went to Italy in the spring of 1769 to train with Padre Giovanni Battista Martini at the Bologna Philharmonic Academy, where he graduated with distinction. He wrote an opera seria Demofoonte to the Italian libretto by Pietro Metastasio for the carnival at Livorno.
Dmytro Bortniansky, a pupil of Hermann Raupach and Baldassare Galuppi, went to Italy following his teacher Galuppi. In Italy, Bortniansky gained considerable success composing operas: Creonte and Alcide in Venice, and Quinto Fabio at Modena.
Bortniansky returned to the court at Saint Petersburg in 1779 where composed four more operas : Le Faucon, Le Fete du Seigneur, Don Carlos, and Le Fils-Rival ou La Moderne Stratonice.
At the same time in Russia, a successful one-act opera Anyuta was created to the text by Mikhail Vasilyevich Popov. Music was a selection of popular songs specified in the libretto. It is a story about a girl called Anyuta, brought up in a peasants’ household, who in fact turned out to be of noble birth, and the story of her love for a nobleman, Victor, eventually ending happily, with wedding bells ringing. The score doesn't survived and the composer of it is unknown, however, sometimes it was attributed to Vasily Pashkevich or even to Yevstigney Fomin who that time was just 11 years old.
The music of another successful Russian opera Melnik – koldun, obmanshchik i svat, on a subject resembling Rousseau’s Le Devin du village, is attributed to a theatre violin player and conductor Mikhail Sokolovsky. Later the music was revised by Yevstigney Fomin.
Vasily Pashkevich, a Russian composer was famous for his comic opera The Miser. Its roles are: Scriagin, Liubima’s guardian; Liubima, his niece; Milovid, her beloved; Marfa, the servant girl that Scriagin is in love with; Prolaz, Milovid’s manservant who is in Scriagin’s service. Accordingly the speech and the names of the characters of Molière's comedy were turned into Russian as well as the music that combines some features of European form with typically Russian melodies. Another his opera Fevey was written to the libretto by Catherine II. Other operas are: The Carriage Accident, Kniper Theatre, The Burden Is Not Heavy if It Is Yours, The Early Reign of Oleg, Fedul and His Children, The Pasha of Tunis and You Shall Be Judged As You Lived — rev. of St Petersburg Bazaar.
Italian-trained Yevstigney Fomin composed about 30 operas including the most successful opera-melodrama Orfey i Evridika to the text by Yakov Knyazhnin. Among his other operas are: The Novgorod Hero Boyeslayevich, The Coachmen at the Relay Station, Soirées, Magician, Fortune-teller and Match-maker, The Miller who was a Wizard, a Cheat and a Match-maker, The Americans, Chloris and Milo, and The Golden Apple.

19th century

The 19th century was the golden age of Russian opera. It began with a success of a massive and slowly developing operatic project: the opera Lesta, dneprovskaya rusalka and its three sequels based on the German romantic-comic piece Das Donauweibchen by Ferdinand Kauer with the Russian text and additional music by Russianized Venetian immigrant Catterino Cavos and Stepan Davydov.
The next success was a patriotic opera Ivan Susanin by Cavos based on an episode from Russian history.
This success was continued with the brilliant operatic career of Alexey Verstovsky, who composed more 30 opera-vaudevilles and 6 grand-operas including Askold's Grave that received about 200 performances in Saint Petersburg and 400 in Moscow only for the first 25 years.
However the most important events in the history of Russian opera were two great operas by Mikhail Glinka A Life for the Tsar, and Ruslan and Lyudmila with his Rusalka and revolutionary The Stone Guest.
Other composers were:
Russian opera reached its apogee with the works by Modest Mussorgsky and his antipode Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov remains the greatest masterpiece of Russian opera, despite what many consider to be serious technical faults and a bewildering array of versions. His other operas were left unfinished:
Pyotr Tchaikovsky completed ten operas including the most famous Eugene Onegin, 1877–1878, 1879 Moscow and The Queen of Spades, 1890, 1890 Saint Petersburg, which now belong to the world's standard repertoire. His other operas are:
Not less important was Aleksandr Borodin’s Prince Igor –.
Prolific Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov completed fifteen operas, the most significant achievements of the art of opera in Russia at the end of the century. The most notable of them are:
The last three of them already belong to the 20th century Russian opera.
There were built a lot of new opera theatres including Bolshoi Theatre.
The history of 19th century Russian opera could be observed in the selected list of premieres at the Saint Petersburg theatres:
as Ivan Susanin in Glinka's A Life for the Tsar
Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre
Mariinsky Theatre
Mamontov's Private Russian Opera established in 1885. Savva Mamontov discovered talent of Chaliapin, commissioned designs from Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Korovin, Natalia Goncharova and Ivan Bilibin, staged the late operas by Rimsky Korsakov.
Opera spread to the provincial centres of Kiev, Odessa and Kharkiv.

20th century

The political collisions of 20th century divided Russian opera composers into those who managed to escape to the West, successfully or not, and those who continued to live in not particular friendly atmosphere of the Soviet and Post-Soviet regimes. And nevertheless, the process of producing of new operas was not diminished, but just opposite, it was immensely grown.
Zimin Opera established in 1904, Sergei Diaghilev's Saisons Russes began in Paris in 1913.
Vladimir Rebikov composer of more than 10 operas is best of all known for his opera The Christmas Tree in which he presented his ideas of "melo-mimics" and "rhythm-declamation".
Sergei Rachmaninoff completed three operas:
All three operas were staged at the Bolshoi Theatre. He began but did not finish the fourth Monna Vanna after Maurice Maeterlinck who refused to give permission to the composer for using of his text. These operas, written on the border between two centuries, rather belong to the world of the romantic opera of the past. Escaping Russia in 1917 Rachmaninoff never returned to operatic projects again.
Unlike him, Igor Stravinsky had been returning to this genre again and again, full of fresh and innovative ideas. Sometimes it is difficult to qualify these works as pure operas but rather "opera-ballets", "opera-cantatas", or "music theatre". Here is the list:
Sergei Prokofiev’s operas are full of humour, wit, and novelty. Here is the list of his completed operas:
Dmitri Shostakovich was another great opera composer struggling all his life in the clutch of the communist ideology. His satirical opera The Nose, after the completely absurd story by Gogol was criticized in 1929 by RAPM as "formalist". His second opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District performed in 1934 with an enormous success was condemned by the authorities even more harshly. This forced him to recompose it much later, in 1962, as Katerina Izmailova in a style more simplified and conventional to meet the requirements of the new rulers of the regime.
Shostakovich was involved in many more operatic projects.
There were a lot more of the composers about the same generation, who had managed to create hundreds of operas. Some of them shared the same problems with Shostakovich and Prokofiev who returned to live to the Soviet Russia, and was deadly embraced by its suffocative regime. Others were at the opposite side, serving the suffocating roles. A serious condemnation and persecution of the Soviet Union's foremost composers, such as Prokofiev, Shostakovich and many others, had emerged in 1948 in connection to the opera by Vano Muradeli, Velikaya druzhba ; see Zhdanov Doctrine.
Here is just a short list of the opera composers of that times:
Also: Vladimir Shcherbachev, Sergei Vasilenko, Vladimir Fere, Vladimir Vlasov, Kirill Molchanov, Alexander Kholminov, etc..
The next generations who found themselves already in the Post-Stalin epoch had own specific problems. The ideological and stylistic control and limitation of creative freedom by the authorities and older colleagues-composers in the hierarchical structures of the Union of Composers made almost impossible the innovation and experiment in any field of musical art. It was a feeling that old bad times returned again, when in 1979 at the Sixth Congress of the Composers' Union, its leader Tikhon Khrennikov denounced seven composers, who for some reason or other had been played in the West – there were at least four opera composers among them.
As a result even quite new phenomena appeared: a "samizdat opera". Some of these operas still never been performed, others luckily received their premieres in the West, and only a few found their place at the operatic stages of the homeland. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not improve this hopeless situation much.
The list of the composers who contributed to the development of Russian opera nearer to the end of the 20th century:
Also: Nikolai Sidelnikov, Andrei Petrov, Sandor Kallosh, Leonid Hrabovsky, Alexander Vustin, Gleb Sedelnikov, Merab Gagnidze, Alexander Tchaikovsky, Vasily Lobanov, Dmitri N. Smirnov, Leonid Bobylev, Vladimir Tarnopolsky, and so on.

21st century

The Russian opera is continuing its development in the 21st century. It began with the noisy premieres of two comic operas, whose genre could be described as "opera-farce":
The first was Tsar Demyan – a frightful opera performance to the libretto by Elena Polenova after a folk-drama Tsar Maksimilyan, premiere 20 June 2001 Mariinski Theatre, Saint Petersburg. Prize "Gold Mask, 2002" and "Gold Soffit, 2002".
Another opera The Children of Rosenthal by Leonid Desyatnikov to the libretto by Vladimir Sorokin, was commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre and premiered on 23 March 2005.

List of Russian opera theatres