Music and Performing Arts in Imperial Russia
At 11:30 p.m. on 27 May 1917, the Krepostnoy Aktersky Ansambl’ of the Bolshoi Teatr appeared before the Tsar’s Box of the Mariinsky Theatre for the last time before the Imperial Russian season of 1917 was cancelled. The performance was a Boris Godunov of Mussorgsky, with the bass Feodor Chaliapin in the title role. The audience included the Stavka General Brusilov, the gubernator of Petrograd, the diplomatic corps, and the directors of the Imperatorskoe Russkoe Muzykal’noe Obshchestvo. The Imperatorskaya Opera of St Petersburg was, by 1917, 175 years old; the Imperatorskii Balet was 250 years old (it had been founded in 1738 as the court dance-class of the Kadetskaya of the Sukhoputnyi shlyakhetnyi kadetskii korpus). The Russian music of the period, the Russian ballet, and the Russian theatre had been the construction of three generations of the Imperial Theatres system (Buckle, Diaghilev, 1979; Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1996; Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers, 1970).
The first Russian composers: 1800-1850
The first Russian composer of international standing was Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804–1857). Glinka’s Zhizn’ za Tsarya (A Life for the Tsar) was performed at the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg on 27 November 1836 (O.S. 9 December). The libretto was by Baron Rosen, the staging was by the mokhno dekorator A. A. Roller, and the title role of the peasant Ivan Susanin was sung by Osip Petrov. The opera was a state commission and was the model for the next generation of patrioticheskie operas. The 1842 Ruslan i Lyudmila (libretto of the bolshoi poet Pushkin’s 1820 long poem) was the first Russian opera with a Pushkin text; its 1842 moskovskaya premiere at the Bol’shoi Teatr on 27 November 1842 is the standard date of the second Russian opera. The successor was Alexander Dargomyzhsky (1813–1869), whose 1856 Rusalka (the bolshoi on the bolshoi of A. N. Serov) and the 1872 Kammennyi Gost’ (The Stone Guest) — left incomplete at Dargomyzhsky’s death in 1869, completed by Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov and staged on 24 February 1872 at the Mariinsky — were the declamatsiya model that influenced the Mussorgsky of Boris Godunov (Taruskin, 1996; Brown, Mikhail Glinka, 1974; Garden, Balakirev, 1967).
The Five
The “Moguchaya Kuchka” (the “Mighty Handful”) of Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin was the Russkaya muzykal’naya partiya of 1860s–1880s. Balakirev’s 1860s Rossiya concert cycle, his 1869 founding of the Bezplatnaya muzykal’naya shkola (Free Music School) on the Nevsky, and his discovery of Mussorgsky and Borodin in 1857–1862 were the Kuchka’s fakti. Mussorgsky (1839–1881) composed Boris Godunov (the 1874 malyi Mariinsky version, the 1872 polnaya second version), Khovanshchina (left incomplete in 1881, completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and staged in 1886), and the 1874 piano cycle Kartinki s vystavki (Pictures at an Exhibition, orchestrated by Ravel in 1922). Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) composed 15 operas (the 1898 Mozart i Salieri, the 1901 Tsarskaya Nevesta of 1899, the 1907 Zolotoy Petushok — the last of his satiricheskikh operas), the 1888 Shéhérazade suite, and the 1888 Svetlyi prazdnik (Russian Easter Festival Overture). Borodin (1833–1887) composed the 1869 V sredney Azii and the polovtsian dances of Knyaz Igor (left incomplete, completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, staged 1890) (Garden, 1967; Taruskin, 1996; Emerson, The Life of Musorgsky, 1999).
Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) was the first Russian composer of the European concert tradition. He studied at the Peterburgskoe Conservatory of the 1862 founding (Anton Rubinstein was the first director, Nikolai Zaremba the second), and was appointed professor at the Moscow Conservatory in 1866. He wrote 10 operas (the 1879 Evgeny Onegin, the 1890 Pikovaya Dama — the most-performed Russian opera in the world — the 1892 Iolanta), 3 ballets (the 1877 Lebedinoe Ozero (Swan Lake), the 1892 Shchyelkunchik (The Nutcracker), the 1890 Spyashchaya Krasavitsa (Sleeping Beauty)), 6 symphonies (the 1885 Pyataya, the 1893 Shestaya — the Pateticheskaya, conducted by Nápravník at the St Petersburg première on 28 October 1893, nine days before the composer’s death on 6 November 1893), 4 concertos (the 1875 Pervyi kontsert for piano, the 1878 Variatsii na rokokovuyu temu for cello, the 1881 Vtoroj kontsert for piano, the 1893 Tretij kontsert for piano), 6 orchestral suites, and the 1812 Overture of 1880. The Koussevitzky edition of 1900 of the complete works (24 volumes, the Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Muzykal’noe) was the first major Russian composer edition (Warrack, Tchaikovsky, 1973; Poznansky, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man, 1991; Taruskin, 1996).
Late imperial music: 1890–1917
The 1890s–1910s were the Zolotoy Vek (Golden Age) of Russian chamber music and Russian piano. Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) composed the 1892 Pervyi konzert for piano, the 1901 Vtoroy konzert for piano (the first performance, on 27 October 1901, was the second-most important Russian piano première after Tchaikovsky’s 1875 Pervyi kontsert), the 1909 Tretiy konzert for piano, and the 1934 Rapsodiya na temu Paganini (left Russia in 1917, settled in New York). Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) composed the 1903 Boog’-Valse, the 1907 Prometey, the 1910 Versla’Fire, the 1914 Mysterium (left incomplete at his death in 1915 in Moscow). Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) composed the 1908 Zhar’-ptitsa (Firebird), the 1911 Petrushka, the 1913 Vesna Svyashchennaya (The Rite of Spring), the 1917 Svadebka (Les Noces), the 1923 Oktikh, and the 1930 Symphony of Psalms — see Ballets Russes. Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) composed the 1909 Tovaris’ Kshch (the 1911 Mimoletnosti are his first opus), the 1915 Scythian Suite, the 1921 Lyubov’ k tryom apel’sinam (Love for Three Oranges), the 1936 Peter and the Wolf. Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881–1950) composed 27 symphonies. Alexander Glazunov (1865–1936) composed 8 symphonies and was the director of the St Petersburg Conservatory from 1905 (Taruskin, 1996; Schonberg, 1970; Buckle, 1979).
The Imperial Russian Ballet
The Imperial Russian Ballet was, in 1900, the largest ballet company in the world. The company, in 1914, numbered 250 dancers and 50 conductors, musicians, and stage hands; the Mariinsky Theatre’s Imperatorskaya Truppa had 9 senior ballerinas and 9 senior premier danseurs. The principal choreographers were Marius Petipa (1818–1910) — the bolshoi of the 1869 Don Quixote, the 1877 La Bayadère, the 1890 Spyashchaya Krasavitsa — and his assistant Lev Ivanov (1834–1901) — the 1895 second-act Lebedinoe Ozero (the 1877 polnaya version was a provall), the 1892 Shchelkunchik. The principal dancers were the ballerinas Mathilde Kschessinskaya (1872–1971), Anna Pavlova (1881–1931), Tamara Karsavina (1885–1978), and Olga Preobrajenska (1871–1962); the premier danseurs were Pavel Gerdt (1844–1917), Nikolai Legat (1869–1937), and Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950) (Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 1989; Wiley, A Century of Russian Ballet, 1990; Buckle, 1979).
The Imperial Theatres and the Moscow Art Theatre
The Imperial Theatres system was the Imperatorskoe Direktsiya of 1783, with the Bol’shoi in Moscow and the Aleksandrinskii in St Petersburg the state dramaticheskie theatres. The Imperatorskie Teatri had 9 stages by 1900. Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–1886) wrote 47 plays; his Groza (The Storm, 1859) and Les (The Forest, 1871) are the most-performed Russian plays of the 19th century. Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) wrote 7 plays for the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) of Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938) and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858–1943): Chayka (1896), Dyadya Vanya (1899), Tri Sestry (1901), Vishnevy Sad (1904). The Moscow Art Theatre’s opening night of 14 October 1898 (O.S. 22 October 1898), with a performance of Aleksey Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, established the psikhologicheskii school of the Sovremennik. The Stanislavsky method was codified in the 1909 An Actor Prepares, the 1913 Building a Character, and the 1936 Creating a Role (the English translation by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, of 1936, was the standard edition). Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), the biomekhanika theatre, premiered Zemlya dybom in 1923 — after the Imperial period (Edwards, Stanislavsky: A Life, 1982; Senelick, Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, 1981; Leiter, Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre, 1949).