The present-day knowledge of Russian music tradition from the 18th to the early 19th centuries, with respect to the operatic stage, still lacks systematic study, and this is due to two factors:
- The traditional bias toward music produced in Russia before the life and activity of composer Mikhail I. Glinka (1804 – 1857), which was developed in Soviet time and still dominates secondary literature in Russian language;
- The scant availability of sources and their dissemination throughout the Russian territory and abroad, a fact representing an obstacle to a reconstruction of historical facts.
This project aims to provide a systematic study of outstanding testimonies of musical culture from the import of opera in Russia (from the 1730s onwards) to the production of the first titles of Russian music theatre responding to the will to create a national repertoire, which took place in the first quarter of the 19th century.
This project includes collecting, elaborating, and making a series of fundamental sources available to the scholarly community, selected according to their condition in terms of risk of disappearing and becoming permanently lost. The collection of these testimonies relies on previous groundwork that allowed me, as a Principal Investigator, to select them as essential to the full reconstruction of Russian music practices.
While elaborating a digital archive based on a database, and of a user’s interface, we will focus on 4 main cores:
- the critical edition of the opera Gorebogatïr’ Kosometovich (The Ill-Fated Knight Kosometovich) by Catherine the Great and composer Vicente Martín y Soler (1788-89): digital publication of libretto and complete music score;
- study and reconstruction of the music reception granted by European Courts to Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich Romanov and his espouse Mariya Fyodorovna in their grand tour of the years 1781-82: collection, interpretation, and edition of unpublished documents;
- the publication of the correspondence Hivart – Sheremetev in original French/Russian with English translation;
- the study of the “Russian fund” preserved at the Library of the Conservatoire “Santa Cecilia” in Rome: classification, digitalization, and selection of sources for publication.
Group leader: Anna Giust (dir.) (PA)
Internal members:
- Anna Stetsenko (post-doc)
External members:
- Sofia Cappelletti (Bologna, Scuola di specializzazione in Beni musicali – intern at Dip. Lingue e letterature Straniere UniVR) (2)
- Roberto Giuliani, Luca Cianfoni, Francesca Candeli (Rome, Biblioteca del Conservatorio “Santa Cecilia”)
- Bella Brover-Lubovsky (Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance) (3)
- John A. Rice (independent researcher) (3)
- Inna Naroditskaya (Northwestern University -Northwestern Bienen School of Music) (2)
Actions: WP 1.1; WP 1.3
References:
Giust, Anna, Cercando l’opera russa. La formazione di una coscienza nazionale nel teatro musicale del Settecento, Amici della Scala-Feltrinelli, Milano 2014, pp. xxi-415, ISBN 9788858817582
Giust, Anna, “Il grand tour del granduca Pavel Petrovič Romanov: andata e ritorno tra Russia ed Europa”, in Diciottesimo secolo, 2 (2017), pp. 143-63
Giust, Anna, “International Networking in Russian Music Theatre around 1800: Sheremetev, Yusupov and Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich”, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, vol. 20/2 (2022), pp. 261-284 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409822000131)
Seaman, Gerald R., «Folk-song in Russian Opera in the 18th Century», Slavonic and East European Review, 41: 96 (1962), pp. 144-57
Link, Dorothea y Leonardo J. Waisman eds., Los siete mundos de Martín y Soler, Actas del congreso internacional, Valencia, 14-18 noviembre 2006, Valencia, Institut Valencia de la musica, Generalitat valenciana, 2010
A. Elizarova, Teatrï Sheremetevïkh, Moskva, Izdaniye Ostankinskogo dvortsa-muzeya, 1944