Highlights
of the Russian opera

During the eighteenth century, especially at the time of Catherine the Great, Russia enjoyed a lively opera life; however, it was not until the nineteenth century that the national Russian opera was created. Musical life at the court of the Czar was predominantly oriented towards the West and attracted, for example, many Italian composers to St. Petersburg. The works they wrote there were also mostly based on Italian libretti, and if a Russian opera was ever performed, it followed on musically in the tradition of the operas that could be heard in Naples, Milan or Vienna.
A slow change came about in this situation during the first half of the nineteenth century, after Russia also began to be influenced by the sense of nationhood which was spreading through great parts of Europe in that period. Furthermore, this was the time during which the well-to-do middle class began to participate increasingly in the cultural life, and therefore, it is not just a coincidence that the birth of the national Russian opera more or less concurred with the opening of the ‘Great’ or ‘Bolshoi’ Theatre in Moscow in 1825.

Glinka
Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857) laid the basis for the Russian opera with Ivan Susanin, a historical drama about a Russian farmer (Ivan Susanin), who led a hostile Polish army astray during the winter of 1612, at the cost of his own life. With special permission from Czar Nicholas I, who was present at one of the rehearsals, the title was changed even before the première to A Life for the Czar, but after the 1917 revolution, the original title was reinstated. Despite the influence of Bellini and the French ‘grand opéra’, A Life for the Czar became an outspoken nationalistic opera, which linked a historical fact with existing melodies and musical motifs.

Dargomyszki
In his pursuit of a ‘national’ Russian opera, Glinka was supported by Alexander Sergeyevich Dargomyszki (1813-1869), who was as a composer predominantly self-taught, and at first followed the French style in his operas. Around 1848, he began to study Russian musical folklore and influenced by this, he wrote Rusalka (1856), a musical fairy-tale in which especially the comic parts were strongly influenced by folklore. This made him, together with Glinka, the trailblazer for the Russian opera style to come, although his works were more popular among his colleagues than among the public. His aspiration of processing literary texts as purely and completely as possible resulted in operas that were at times somewhat lacking in the theatrical element, although they were excellently constructed as far as the music was concerned.

The central figure in Dargomyszki’s opera, based on Pushkin’s poem of the same title, is the miller’s daughter Natasia, who is deceived by a prince. She throws herself into the river and becomes a water nymph who entices men to their dead. When the prince later arrives at the river, he meets Natasia’s father there, who has gone mad due to the events.

Tchaikovsky
The national Russian opera tradition as it came about in the nineteenth century was strongly influenced by musical and literary folklore, and by the increasing interest in the rich Russian past. Various works by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) formed an exception to this rule: he transformed Russian opera into a psychological character drama, which was capable of competing on equal footing with the best of Western works. The fascination he felt for opera took root when he first saw a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the age of 10; and only four years later, while still reeling from the death of his mother, he wrote the text for a one-act opera (which he did not put to music, by the way). Ten years later, he composed a scene to a text from Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, but this music belongs to the early works that he himself destroyed, as did the opera, The Voyevoda (1869), which, however, was performed in the Bolshoi Theatre, and was later reconstructed to a great extent, based on the material written at the time.

Tchaikovsky’s interest in opera grew after seeing a performance of Carmen in Paris in 1876, where he was struck by the linking of love to fate and by Bizet’s effective musical design. That experience made itself felt later on in the Queen of Spades (1890), which was based on a novella by Pushkin. This work, which like Carmen is entirely dominated by the relationship between love and fate, gave the composer the opportunity of creating some remarkably strong characters in the officer Hermann, who is destroyed by his destiny, and in his lover Lisa, who commits suicide after a disastrous love affair. Furthermore, the libretto gave him the opportunity to write music in an elegant style that reminds one of the culture at the French courts of the 18th century.

Iolanthe (1892), his last opera, does not take place in Russia, but in the Provence, and deals with a theme from the Middle Ages: it is a lyrical work about the legendary king René of Anjou (1409-1480).

The principal character, Princess Iolanthe, was born blind, but at her father’s orders, no-one has ever told her that she is different to other people. When the knight Vaudémont falls under the spell of her charms, he makes her aware of her blindness for the first time. He is thereupon sentenced to death, which awakens in Iolanthe the desire to see, and thus brings about her cure.

Tchaikovsky made a major contribution to Russian national opera in 1884 with Mazeppa. This historical drama, based on Pushkin’s poem Poltava (1829), tells of the renowned hetman (= leader) of the Ukrainian Cossacks, Ivan Stepanovich Mazeppa, and a number of events that apparently took place around the battle of Poltava (1709). The most important story-line concerns the hopeless love Mazeppa cherishes for Maria, the daughter of one of his political opponents.

Rachmaninoff
At the age of 20, Serge Vassilievich Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) won a student competition with his one-act opera Aleko, but despite this, he never later decided to present himself as an opera composer. Besides finding it difficult to choose between a career as a composer or as a performing musician, the fact that this piano virtuoso tended more towards the lyrical than the dramatic in his music was certainly also a major factor. Traces of this can also be seen in Aleko, a one-act opera based on Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies, although in fairness to Rachmaninoff we must mention that he did not choose the libretto himself. After all, it was an exam project which he wrote following an assignment by his teacher Anton Arensky, and for which he had to make use of the same libretto as two fellow students.

The opera tells the story of Aleko, an outsider, who left with the gypsies for love of the beautiful Zemfira. When Zemfira finally chooses a young man from among her own people, Aleko kills her, and is then cast out by the gypsies. From the story told by an old gypsy during the introductory scene, it becomes clear that Zemfira has inherited her fickleness, for the old man had once been abandoned by her mother.

Borodin
Although Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (1833-1887) began three times on a work for the music theatre, he was to complete only his first opera, the farce The Bogatirs (1867) – and unfortunately for him, it turned out to be a fiasco. It was a very different case for Prince Igor, an opera on which he worked for 18 years: and, despite that lengthy period of time, the score still had to be made ready for performance after his death by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov. It tells the story of Igor, the king of Poultivle, who went off in 1185 to battle the Polovetsian troops, and was taken prisoner by the Polovetsian leader Khan Konchak. Despite a certain lack of dramatic potential, this historical drama – of which the première took place in 1890 in St. Petersburg – achieved international acclaim as one of the most popular Russian operas. An important reason for this were the renowned ‘Polovetsian dances’, which brought Borodin an unprecedented popularity in the concert hall. The best-known vocal numbers from the opera include the arias of Prince Igor and Khan Konchak, who develop a great mutual admiration during Igor’s imprisonment, but who nevertheless remain formidable political opponents.