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

4 Visual Impressions

88 four Visual Impressions In retrospect, Mamontov’s decision to commission easel painters to design his operatic productions seems natural: he had access to Russia’s premier artistic forces and would certainly want to benefit from it. In reality, the idea was unprecedented, at least in the Russia of Mamontov’s time. There, easel and design were viewed as two professions no less different than, say, painting and singing. After the initial reports came in, stating that at the MPO, “the execution of set designs has been entrusted not to typical decorators-artisans, but to painters,” the common reaction was widespread amazement coupled with understandable skepticism.1 As Russkoe Slovo critic Alexander Gruzinsky put it: “clearly, not every decorator is an artist, nor can every artist-painter necessarily make a good decorator—this much is obvious.”2 Not only did the skepticism subside, but Mamontov’s innovation fundamentally altered the role of the designer on the Russian stage, both dramatic and operatic. The Moscow Art Theater was the first to follow in Mamontov’s footsteps, when its leader Stanislavsky employed an MPO alumnus, painter Victor Simov, as his chief decorator. The Imperial stage was not far behind. Soon after his appointment as the new head of the Moscow crown theaters, Vladimir Telyakovsky (1860–1924) secured Konstantin Korovin’s designing talent for the Bolshoi, and upon his transfer to St. Petersburg as the director of the Imperial Theaters, added Alexander Golovin to the Mariinsky staff. In 1905, Vsevolod Meyerhold employed the three youngest painters of the Mamontov Circle, Nikolai Sapunov, Sergei Sudeikin, and Nikolai visual impressions · 89 Ulyanov, to design the Povarskaya Studio productions (see chapter 6). Finally, Sergei Diaghilev used Serov, Korovin, Golovin, and a number of St. Petersburg–based artists in his Parisian Russian Seasons, later making these painters’ designs an integral part of the Ballets Russes. Thus, appointment of easel painters as set designers, unheard of before Mamontov, would become commonplace within two decades after the MPO first opened its doors. Another fundamental change brought about by Mamontov’s new approach concerned the perceived value of design works. Previously, stage sets were prized less for their quality and more for their utility, including adaptability to productions other than their own. The most useful were generalized settings—a Renaissance palace, a medieval castle, a rococo boudoir—that could be taken out of storage as needed after having been located by literally browsing the Imperial Theater catalogue .3 The individuality of each particular project obviously suffered as a result. Indeed, whenever a production-specific design was judged too unique to be reused, it would habitually be destroyed or recycled. Unfortunately, such fate befell the set from one of Mamontov’s own productions, the tableau vivant Aphrodite, created for the art program of the All-Russian Congress of Artists (see chapter 2), which was never returned either to designer Polenov or to stage director Mamontov after the show. A letter to Polenov, in which Mamontov comments on the disappearance of the Aphrodite set, illustrates both his personal philosophy and his distaste for the status quo: “I believe that your Aphrodite and Orfeo are real masterpieces that truly belong in a museum. And do you know that your Aphrodite is tyu-tyu [gone]? The museum’s night watchmen must have used it for foot wraps.”4 The lack of independent artistic value placed on the sets by most theaters also meant that preparing separate designs for each new production was a luxury—even for the state-supported Imperial stage, let alone for cash-strapped private enterprises. Yet this was common practice at the MPO, a fact noted with incredulity by critics such as Gruzinsky, who, in the review cited above, discussed “completely new sets” being prepared for the MPO’s production of Prince Igor.5 Mamontov’s tireless promotion of his approach and the success of his company gradually led to a more widespread acceptance of the new practice: stage sets began to be viewed as independent artworks that 90 · mamontov’s private opera really did “belong in a museum.” Previously rarely mentioned outside theater reviews, they started attracting attention as distinct objets d’art, equal to painting and sculpture. Stasov dedicated a whole section of his article “Moskovskaya Chastnaya Opera v Peterburge” [“Moscow Private Opera in St. Petersburg”] to the work of Mamontov’s designers, and made the Snow Maiden sets the centerpiece of a Victor Vasnetsov feature published...