The Russian Opera. Newmarch Rosa
often visited her mother at Ismailov, was also a lover of the theatre. The ladies in waiting joined Fürst’s pupils in the performance of plays, while the Duchess of Mecklenburg frequently acted as stage manager. The entrance was free, and although the places were chiefly reserved for the courtiers, the public seems to have been admitted somewhat indiscriminately, if we can believe the account of the page in waiting, Bergholds, who says that once his tobacco was stolen from his pocket and that two of his companions complained of losing their silk handkerchiefs.
About 1770 a theatrical company, consisting entirely of native actors and actresses, was established in St. Petersburg under the patronage of the Tsarevna Natalia Alexseievna, who herself wrote two plays for them to perform. This princess did all in her power to second the efforts of Peter the Great to popularise the drama. In 1720 the Tsar sent Yagoujinsky to Vienna to raise a company of actors who could speak Czech, thinking that they would learn Russian more quickly than the Germans, but the mission was not successful. In 1723 a German company, under the direction of Mann, visited the new capital and gave performances in their own tongue. They were patronised by the Empress Catherine I. At that time the Duke of Holstein, who afterwards married the Tsarevna Anne, was visiting St. Petersburg, and the Court seem to have frequently attended the theatre; but there is no definite record of Mann’s company giving performances of opera. A new theatre was inaugurated in St. Petersburg in 1725, the year of Peter the Great’s death.
CHAPTER II
RUSSIAN OPERA PRIOR TO GLINKA
THE history of Russian music enters upon a new period with the succession of the Empress Anne. The national melodies now began to be timidly cultivated, but the inauguration of a native school of music was still a very remote prospect, because the influence of Western Europe was now becoming paramount in Russian society. Italian music had just reached the capital, and there, as in England, it held the field against all rivals for many years to come.
Soon after her coronation, in 1732, the pleasure-loving Empress Anne organised private theatricals in her Winter Palace and wrote to Bishop Theofane Prokovich, asking him to supply her with three church singers. The piece given was a “school drama” entitled The Act of Joseph, and in its mounting and composition, a famous pupil of the Slaviano-Latin Academy took part, Vassily Cyrillovich Trediakovsky, poet and grammarian, and one of the first creators of the literary language of Russia. The rest of the actors consisted of the singers lent by the Bishop and of pupils selected from the Cadet Corps, among them Peter and Carl, sons of Anne’s favourite, Biron. Some of the actors’ parts are still in existence, with descriptions of their costumes, and details as to the requirements of the piece, which seem to show that the entire Biblical story of Joseph was presented, and that some allegorical personages such as Chastity, Splendour, Humility, and Envy, were introduced into the play. Splendour was attired in a red cloth garment, slashed and trimmed with silver braid; Chastity was in white without ornaments, crowned with a laurel wreath and carrying a sheaf of lilies. Besides Jacob, Joseph, and his Brethren, there were parts for King Pharaoh and two of his senators, Wise Men, slaves, attendants, and an executioner, who, we read, was clad in a short tunic of red linen and wore a yellow cap with a feather.
These old-fashioned, edifying plays soon bored the Empress Anne. Italian actors appeared at the Court and gave amusing comedies, occasionally containing musical interludes. The Empress employed Trediakovsky to translate the pieces that were played before her; for she was no Italian scholar. The new form of entertainment was so much to her liking that she determined to establish a permanent Italian company in St. Petersburg, and was the first to open a theatre in Russia exclusively for opera. This brings upon the scene a personality inseparably linked with the history of Russian opera: Francesco Araja, who is the first palpable embodiment of operatic music in Russia, for all his predecessors who composed for the plays of Kunst and Fürst have remained anonymous.
Araja was born at Naples in 1700. His first opera, Berenice, was given at the Court of Tuscany in 1730; his second, Amore per Regnante, was produced soon afterwards in Rome. This seemed to have attracted the attention of the Russian ambassador to Italy, and in 1735 the composer was invited to St. Petersburg as director of the new Italian opera company. The performances took place in the Winter Palace during the winter, and in the summer in the Theatre of the Summer Garden. It is possible that Araja’s first season opened with a performance of one of his own works with Russian text. Trediakovsky’s translation of La Forza dell’Amore e dell’Odio is described as “a drama for music performed at the New Theatre, by command of Her Imperial Highness Anna Johannovna, Autocrat of all the Russias. Published in St. Petersburg by the Imperial Academy of Science.” It is not impossible that this comparatively unimportant work actually led to Trediakovsky’s great literary innovation: the replacing of syllabic verse by tonic accent. It is significant that his book on this subject came out in the same year, and Cheshikin thinks that the study of the Italian opera of the eighteenth century, with its correct versification, may have suggested to him the theories which he sets forth in it. The same opera was given two years later in Italian under the title of Abizare. Other operas by Araja given in the Russian language are Seleucus (1744), Mithriadates (1747), Eudocia Crowned, or Theodosia II. (1751), and Dido Forsaken, the libretto by Metastasio (1758); the last named was given in Moscow the following year, and was apparently the first of Araja’s works to be heard in the old capital.
The Empress Elizabeth succeeded her cousin Anne in 1741, and Araja continued to be Court Capellmeister. Like Peter the Great, Elizabeth was anxious to popularise the drama in Russia. She showed a taste for Gallic art, and established a company which gave French comedies and tragedies alternately with Araja’s opera company. Elizabeth urged her ladies in waiting to attend every performance, and occasionally announced that the upper classes among the merchants might be present on certain nights “provided they were properly dressed.”[3]
Russian opera made a decided step in advance when in 1751 Araja composed music to a purely Russian text. The subject, La Clemenza di Tito, which Mozart subsequently treated in 1791, had nothing in common with the national life, but the libretto was the work of F. G. Volkov, and the effect was quite homogeneous, for all the singers sang in the vernacular instead of some using the Russian and some the Italian language as was formerly done. This tasteless custom did not wholly die out until well into the nineteenth century, but it became less and less general. Thus in 1755 we hear of Araja’s Cephalus and Procius being confided entirely to singers of Russian birth. The book of this opera was by Soumarakov, based on materials borrowed from the “Metamorphoses” of Ovid. The work is said to have been published in 1764, and is claimed by some to be the earliest piece of music printed in Russia. J. B. Jurgenson, head of the famous firm of music publishers in Moscow, who has diligently collected the Russian musical publications of the eighteenth century, states that he has never found any of Araja’s operas printed with music type. The fact that music was printed in Russia before the reign of Catherine II. still needs verification. The scenery of Cephalus was painted by Valeriani, who bore one of the high sounding titles which it was customary to bestow at the Court of Russia—being distinguished as “First Historical Painter, Professor of Perspective (scene painting) and Theatrical Engineer at the Imperial Court of Russia.” Among the singers who took part in the performance were Elizabeth Bielogradsky, daughter of a famous lute player, Count Razoumovsky, and Gravrilo Martsenkovich, known as Gravriloushko. The success of the opera was brilliant, and the Empress presented the composer with a fine sable coat as a mark of her gratification. In 1755, Araja, having amassed considerable wealth, returned to Italy and spent the remaining years of his life at Bologna.
Music under the Empress Elizabeth became a fashionable craze. Every great landowner started his private band or choir. About this time, the influence of the Empress’s favourite, Razoumovsky, made itself felt in favour of Russian melodies. By this time, too, a few talented native musicians had been trained either in the Court Chapel or in some of the private orchestras established by the aristocracy; but the influx of foreigners into Russia threatened to swamp the frail craft of native talent which had just been launched with pride upon the social sea. The majority