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The Opera Quarterly 20.2 (2004) 293-299



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Valery Gergiev and the Kirov: A Story of Survival. John Ardoin. Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 2001. 296 pages, $34.95.
Covent Garden: The Untold Story. Norman Lebrecht. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001. 580 pages, $40.00

These books on the Kirov Theater in St. Petersburg and Covent Garden in London, published within a year of one another, reached my desk to be reviewed at the same time.1 Both theaters, long among the most important in the world, have quite a few things in common, especially the many important singers who sang in both houses. But there also is a big difference: many books have been written about Covent Garden, with others in preparation, while the Kirov boasts only a few titles, of which this is the first in English.

In the preface, the late John Ardoin describes his volume on the Kirov as [End Page 293] four books in one: a portrait of the present-day director, conductor Valery Gergiev; a history of the building and those who have occupied it since the theater opened in 1860; his own personal journal, in which the Mariinsky's composers, repertory, and personalities are seen through the sensibilities and interests of someone from the West; and the story of a major Russian theatrical entity attempting to survive in the turmoil and corruption of the postcommunist period. The author considered the fourth "book" the most important and devoted a great deal of space to it. I prefer to see the book as only two books in one: the distant past, perhaps up to the end of the communist regime, and the more recent past and present. But this question of semantics in no way changes the contents of, or my views on, the book.

At first glance, seeing that the title of the book refers to the Kirov, seeing countless references to (and pictures of) the Mariinsky, and believing the two theaters to be different, I was quite confused. But all is easily explained. The history of opera in St. Petersburg started in 1735, when the empress imported a troupe of Italian singers to perform at the Winter Palace. The Hermitage and Bolshoi theaters were built in the 1780s, the latter (also referred to as the Bolshoi Kamenniy Teatr) being the principal theater in Russia for close to a century. It was referred to in the West as the Imperial Theater. Another theater, built even earlier, was the Maliy, or little theater. During the late eighteenth century and the first four decades of the nineteenth, Russian, German, French, and Italian troupes performed sporadically in St. Petersburg. But during the Lenten season of 1843 the great tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini organized an Italian company for a few performances, then returned with Tamburini, Viardot, and others for a major season in 1843-44. These Italian seasons at the Imperial became a staple for some forty years, rivaling those in Paris and Milan by presenting the world's greatest singers throughout the autumn and winter. London and Vienna engaged more or less the same artists for the spring.

Another theater, occasionally used for Russian opera, burned in 1859. Next year, the sumptuous Mariinsky Theater was built. It was used for the next twenty-five or so years by the Russian company, which made a slow comeback, while the Italians reached their apogee with the world premiere of Verdi's La forza del destino in 1862. During the 1870s the impresario of the Italian company engaged a much larger group of singers, scheduling them to shuttle back and forth between the two Bolshoi theatres (in Moscow and St. Petersburg). The Italians were finally disbanded in St. Petersburg at the end of the 1884-85 season. In the meantime, vast state funds were committed to the Russian company at the Mariinsky, which prospered, giving both Western operas in Russian translation and the premieres of many Russian operas, most notably Boris Godunov on 8 February 1874. The old Bolshoi Kamenniy was razed, and...

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