Mamontov's Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in Russian Theater

5 Opera as Drama

130 five Opera as Drama As we have seen, Savva Mamontov’s name virtually never graced the Moscow Private Opera’s playbills. As founder and patron of the company , he was certainly never on its payroll; indeed, he had no official job description within “Mrs. Winter’s private operatic enterprise.”1 In the memoir literature, we see many references to Mamontov as “the guiding spirit” of his company,2 the creative center of each production, whose mere presence in the theater galvanized the cast into producing their best work in rehearsal or performance.3 Yet, while poetic and flattering to our protagonist, these descriptions are admittedly vague, and make one wish for a simple declarative statement on what exactly Mamontov did at the company, apart from keeping it financially afloat.4 The next two chapters of this book take as their starting point just such a simple declaration from a former employee whose legacy is rarely associated today with opera theater. Looking back at his brief tenure at the MPO, Sergei Rachmaninov recalled: “Mamontov was a born stage director.”5 It is notable that Rachmaninov did not exactly mean the title as a compliment, but instead as a wistful indictment of Mamontov’s comparative lack of interest in “purely musical” matters. This, of course, is a familiar accusation that a number of Mamontov’s associates, from Polenov to Rimsky-Korsakov, made in reference to his view of opera as a colorful spectacle rather than a piece of music that just happens to be staged. A number of surviving archival documents demonstrate, moreover , that Mamontov craved not only visual brilliance, but also—and opera as drama · 131 perhaps more so—powerful drama. This view is clearly revealed in his comments on The Tsar’s Bride—an MPO production that he was forced to relinquish, after his arrest in September 1899, to Rimsky-Korsakov’s supervision. In a letter to Shkafer regarding poor audience turnout for the third performance of the opera, Mamontov wrote: Sincerely happy for the success of The Tsar’s Bride. [But] what happened is what I was afraid of. From the third night on, the ticket sales have weakened. The music is probably wonderful, the staging apparently is also successful, the vocal performance is also good, but is there a powerful talented performance of the drama? Musicians sometimes put this issue on the back burner. So, strict musical judges are pleased, while the audience keeps yawning.6 The creation of the powerful drama on stage that Mamontov considered so necessary for the production’s success was to him a responsibility of the stage director. He viewed that position not as that of a “stage manager,” whose role was limited to coordinating singers’ entrances and exits, but in a radically modern light as a true author of a staged production , who led rehearsals, designed mises-en-scène, coached the soloists, as well as coordinated other aspects of the work.7 There were virtually no precedents in Russian opera theater for such a novel job description, and thus no model for Mamontov to follow.8 Unsurprisingly, his conceptualization of the stage director’s role developed in parallel with his views on synthesis of the arts and in the same familiar environment of Abramtsevo. Theater, as we have seen, was important to the regulars of the Mamontov Circle, starting with the “Mamontov Drama Nights” led and documented by Mstislav Prakhov in the late 1870s and culminating in the full-length 1882 performance of Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden that became the group’s aesthetic manifesto.9 It was in these home theatricals that Mamontov—long a frustrated actor and a reliable dramatist and librettist of the Circle—first took upon himself the stage director’s role. Outside the walls of Abramtsevo, he would wear the same mantle for the 1894 production of Aphrodite and the 1880 concert performance of Schumann’s Manfred, a joint production of the Maly Drama Theater and the Moscow Conservatory.10 Informed by these experiences, the coming-of-age of Mamontov the stage director arrived with the Moscow Private Opera, where his artistry reached a new level of complexity and sophistication. 132 · mamontov’s private opera Mamontov as Stage Director Mamontov’s contemporaries valued his MPO stage directing work very highly. His associate Pyotr Melnikov declared it exemplary, indeed “artistically ideal, for I believe you have no rivals in this field.”11 The critics...