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Tchaikovsky enjoyed composing Yevgeni Onegin. He expressed his fulfillment in a famous letter to Sergey Taneyev. What could his enthusiasm convey about the content of the project? Music criticism has taken Tchaikovsky’s words as proof for the thesis that the opera is connected to autobiographical circumstances. In this mode of thinking, the quality of Tchaikovsky’s music is the result of the composer’s identification with the subject matter. Despite the objection of several Tchaikovsky scholars, the autobiographical paradigm remains very much alive in the reception of Tchaikovsky’s music. As an alternative, Tchaikovsky scholarship has explored a hermeneutical approach that would link his music to its context in Russian society and culture. In this paper, I present another possible reaction to Tchaikovsky’s statement: an exploration of the composer’s approach to musical characterization. Analysis of some key scenes reveals that the definition of characters and situations by musical means is more precise than standard interpretations of the opera would concede. This discovery may lead to a new assessment of characterization as a critical tool to refine the definition of Tchaikovsky’s position in European music history. The method may be applied to examples outside his operatic output, such as Serenade for Strings and the Fifth Symphony.

The two main narratives that coexist in Russian musicological literature - notably in the field of opera - fall within the branches of russkaja and zarubežnaja muzyka. The first is inward-looking, self-referential, aiming at enhancing the peculiarities of the original, peculiar, and autochthonous contribution to Russian musical culture; the other studies Western music and its evolution separately from the previous one. This approach differs from Western scholarship, which today tries to integrate the Russian musical phenomenon into the global horizon. While this difference can be explained through historical reasons, much remains to be done regarding communication between scientific communities and the coordination of efforts made to study sources that are still too dispersed and difficult to submit to an overall view. Observing the current state of research, my contribution highlights potential directions in the frame of Slavic studies, such as the reception of Western opera in Russia, the mobility of musicians and musical assets, the reception and evolution of aesthetic thinking, and the vocabulary with which this was expressed, particularly in the imperial era.

In Russia opera dances emerged in the eighteenth century, distinguishing themselves from other theatre works that included dance; the most important works and composers of this period will be summarized. As a repertoire of continuing interest, opera dances began with those of Mikhail Glinka in 1836 and 1842. Problems of studying the opera dances since then, including local practice, faulty scholarship and press criticism, will be identified. The principal makers of opera dances in Russia are introduced next together with their accomplishments, not least in light of so-called theatre reforms of the early 1880s, which favored opera over ballet proper. Finally, selected opera dances from Glinka to Tchaikovsky are analysed, with elaborations from historical records and the contemporary press.

A conference on Russian opera, held in Leeds, England, November 16-17, 2010, is discussed.

This paper focuses on Catherine II’s The Early Reign of Oleg (1790) as a demonstrative performance of the sovereign’s policy. In the context of Catherine’s early nationalistic pride and her ‘Greek project’, the performance is understood as a synthesis embodying in music the vision of Russia as an Empire ready to receive the heritage of Byzantium, thanks to Sarti’s use of modes combined with the Russian folk elements introduced by Canobbio and Pashkevich. In this context, Nikolay L’vov represents the joining link, having theorised that Russian folk music originated from ancient Greek music.

\"Libretto-bashing has a distinguished tradition in the blood sport of opera,\" writes Arthur Groos in the introduction to this broad survey of critical approaches to that much-maligned genre. To examine, and to challenge, the long-standing prejudice against libretti and the scholarly tradition that has, until recently, reiterated it, Groos and Roger Parker have commissioned thirteen stimulating essays by musicologists, literary critics, and historians. Taken as a whole, the volume demonstrates that libretti are now very much within the purview of contemporary humanistic scholarship. Libretti pose questions of intertextuality, transposition of genre, and reception history. They invite a broad spectrum of contemporary reading strategies ranging from the formalistic to the feminist. And as texts for music they raise issues in the relation between the two mediums and their respective traditions. Reading Opera will be of value to anyone with a serious interest in opera and contemporary opera criticism. The essays cover the period from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on works of the later nineteenth century. The contributors are Carolyn Abbate, William Ashbrook, Katherine Bergeron, Caryl Emerson, Nelly Furman, Sander L. Gilman, Arthur Groos, James A. Hepokoski, Jurgen Maehder, Roger Parker, Paul Robinson, Christopher Wintle, and Susan Youens. Originally published in 1988. ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Among the myriad of extra-musical references typical of the language of opera, the relationship between the sound of the French horn and marital infidelity is, although relatively rare, one of the subtlest topoi of opera. This is based on the etymology of the Italian word: this verbal joke denotes the attention that authors such as Cimarosa, Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi (and even Stravinsky) devoted to musical imagery, a field in which the relationship 'corni' (horns) vs 'corna' (cuckoldry) is frequently adopted. With the purpose of proposing a taxonomy, this hilarious gimmick can be interpreted according to the dictates of modern linguistics and semiotics.

This article is based on the key-note lecture given at the conference “Non-Nationalist” Russian Operas, Leeds, U.K., on 17 November 2010. It engages with the conference's distinction between the “nationalist” and “non-nationalist” and proposes six potential situations for when an opera might be described as “Russian”: by composer's intention, by reception, by interpretation, by association, by blood or culture, and by emanating from the nationalist school. Given that these six categories of Russianness (some of them mystificatory) form a network of conflicting claims upon any opera, there is no straightforward method for assigning operas to Russian or non-Russian categories. Therefore an alternative approach is proposed: to revive the older concept of “local color,” which figured prominently in nineteenth-century Russian discourse on opera, and to use this as a lens through which almost any nineteenth-century Russian opera can instructively be viewed. After examining how the concept was understood by leading Russian critics, Serov and Cui, the author offers a selection of her own examples to elucidate the use of “Russian” local color. It is emphasized that there are certain limits beyond which this color cannot be applied: characters of noble birth, even when Russian, are rarely portrayed in Russian colors; scenes that take place outside Russia usually have their own, appropriate color, e.g., “Polish” or “Oriental”; most importantly, themes that are considered universal, such as love or death, are usually exempt from Russian coloring. Examples from the late operas of Rimsky-Korsakov demonstrate his conscious and sometimes obsessive efforts in creating appropriate colors, Russian and otherwise. This approach allows us to set aside preconceived notions of which composers were truly national, especially when we generalize that local color denotes any distinguishing device designed to evoke a specific time and place, as well as the social identity of a character. Thus Tchaikovsky's operas, often criticized for their lack of “Russianness,” display a subtle understanding of appropriate coloring:Eugene Onegin, for example, uses an idiom based on the parlor song of the Russian gentry, whileThe Queen of Spadestakes up eighteenth-century idioms—in both cases lending the drama an appropriate color. The article concludes that local color, a much-used device in nineteenth-century opera across Europe, was an almost obligatory requirement for Russian opera composers who adopted an aesthetic of the characteristic, along the lines proposed by Victor Hugo in hisPreface to Cromwell. The concept proves to be a valuable critical tool that allows us to deal with nineteenth-century Russian opera without becoming ensnared in essentializing distinctions between “nationalist” and “non-nationalist.” At the same time, it allows us to put Russian color in perspective, as one color among many cultivated by opera composers.

Stravinsky has a deserved reputation for manipulating the sound of words, which, among other factors, has given rise to accusations of “antihumanism” against the composer and his music. However, close analysis of the opera The Rake's Progress (1948–51) shows that Stravinsky actually takes care to set the text intelligibly, and at certain moments, even expressively. By analyzing metric displacement and motivic development as it evolved from the composer's earlier neoclassical settings—including Oedipus Rex (1927), the Symphony of Psalms (1930), and Perséphone (1934)—through his first efforts at serial composition in the Cantata (1952), this article contextualizes the seemingly anomalous expressiveness in The Rake's Progress. Discovery of this evolution in his approach to setting text also entails a reassessment of the composer's aesthetic concerns.