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  • Russia's Male and Female Centuries
  • Oleg Timofeyev
Inna Naroditskaya . Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage (New York: Oxford Univ., 2012). Pp. xvi + 401. $74

According to an unwritten yet widely observed convention in the West, Russian music starts in the latter half of the nineteenth century, not much earlier than Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, or Borodin. Thus, let me first salute Irina Naroditskaya for the unusual decision of starting her story about Russian music at least a hundred years earlier. Even more unusual, she chooses a highly original critical angle. The author boldly dichotomizes the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Russian musical culture as "her" and "his," respectively. The first half of the book is dedicated to the enormous importance of Russia's female monarchs ("female tsars," as Naroditskaya occasionally calls them) in shaping the eighteenth-century musical landscape. The second part concerns the male-dominated nineteenth century and shows that the more familiar, more recent composers constantly reflected on the earlier female kingdom in works as well known today as Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades (1890) and Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko (1898).

In her brief introduction, which she calls an "Overture," Naroditskaya interprets the ornate images of feminine monarchies in nineteenth-century operas as resulting from a collective memory of the preceding century. She demonstrates that in Russia, there are historical reasons to associate royal [End Page 137] power with women: for two thirds of the eighteenth century (or exactly for sixty-six years), four empresses ruled the Russian empire.

Naroditskaya's first chapter offers a detailed look at masquerades and other court entertainments staged by the tsarinas. We learn that the emancipation of female nobility in the eighteenth century coincided with a general westernization of court life. The male tsars who came before did not experience the glory of eighteenth-century coronations, reduced in their celebration to "amazing silence." An informative chart (42-43) shows how operas by Francesco Araia, Johann Adolf Hasse, Vincenzo Manfredini, and Tommaso Traetta were produced for the high points in the new court life, including the empress's birthdays, coronations, name days, and wedding anniversaries. Of special interest is the author's chapter entitled "Recycling and Russifying Seria," in which she discusses the fate of "serious," historical Italian operas (opera seria) on the Russian soil. Naroditskaya argues that they not only functioned "as a decoration for the Russian crown," affirming the Russian monarch's radiance, but also that "the plots and characters, as remote as they were, served the immediate political and social goals of the empire" (49). Naroditskaya goes on to discuss Ippolit Bogdanovich's Slaviane (1787) and Catherine the Great's The Early Reign of Oleg (1791), showing the thematic and dramatic relationship of these librettos to Pietro Metastasio's librettos for Alessandro (1725) and Artaserse (1738).

Naroditskaya's second chapter concerns the heritage of French comedy (as opposed to the Italian heroic plots discussed in the previous chapter). Here, the author presents such a tight knot of themes and ideas that the chapter could almost be untangled into a separate book. We are introduced to the realities of Russian private serf theater, to the theatrical cross-class dressing, to Catherine the Great's contribution to such pursuits, and to a whole lineage of "poor" female celebrities, both the stage characters (Aniuta, Nina) and real-life women (Praskovia Zhemchugova, the celebrated serf actress and singer). All in all, it is satisfying to see Russian sentimentalism explored with greater depth and complexity than one finds in textbooks, where Russian sentimentalism is usually limited to Nikolaï Mikhailovïch Karamanzin's Poor Liza (1792).

The next two chapters invite us to take a closer look at the impressive creativity and entrepreneurial skills of the book's main heroine, Catherine the Great, and are, therefore, important to the central argument. Naroditskaya not only pays attention to the political and social overtones of Catherine's dramatic works, but also, most importantly, emphasizes her role on the operatic side of things: "Catherine not only wrote libretti but immersed herself in operatic production: selecting composers, choosing actors for lead roles, attending rehearsals and performances, and suggesting costumes" (85). For her productions, the mighty...

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