Abstract
On October 27, 1872, Savva and Liza Mamontov arrived in Rome, their three children and nanny in tow, planning to stay for seven months. While Savva periodically returned to Russia to oversee railroad construction, Liza remained in a rented villa through late May, tending to their ailing son Andrei and carousing with a circle of Russian expatriates. The couple would play a key role in the transformation of Russian opera 13 years later, when the Imperial Theaters dissolved their monopoly (1882) and private enterprises appeared in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Savva Ivanovich Mamontov, a railway magnate and prominent arts patron, founded, financed, and directed the influential Moscow Private Opera (1885–87; 1896–99). Elizaveta Grigor’evna Sapozhnikova Mamontova (1847–1908) organized arts and crafts workshops at Abramtsevo, the family summer residence and art colony just north of Moscow. Though not directly involved in Savva’s opera enterprise, she provided the inspiration for many of its productions, encouraging the artists he employed to study and revive Russian peasant architecture and handicrafts, and create murals and sets based on folklore themes.
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Notes
Mark (Mordochai) Antokol’skii (1843–1902) and Vasilii Polenov (1844–1927) championed the ideals of the “Itinerants,” or Peredvizhniki, a group of artists who seceded from the Academy of Arts in 1863, rejecting neoclassicism and romanticism in favor of realist painting. The Itinerants traveled to the countryside to exhibit their work and cultivate a love for art among “the people.” Their adherents believed that the function of art was to engage and elucidate social and moral problems. On the ethos of the Itinerants and aesthetics of Russian critical realism more broadly, see Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, the State, and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), esp. 3–48. Adrian Prakhov, like the artists, was in Rome on an academic scholarship. In 1878 Antokol’skii was awarded the Grand Prize at the Paris World Exposition, and enjoyed international renown for his sculptures of Christ and Russian historical figures. Polenov made his most significant mark as a landscape painter, using plein air techniques to convey emotional states and the lyricism of the Russian countryside. Prakhov devoted himself to the restoration of medieval art and architecture when he returned to Russia and completed his studies.
I am relying here on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogical self as an “I” forged in dialogue with others, or in the social realm. The dialogical self is not a singular and unified Cartesian self but rather a multiplicity of selves. It is experienced as a collection of independent “I” positions interacting with each other or with imagined and real others. See Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 79–80. At the fin de siècle, the dialogical, decentered model of selfhood coexisted in tension with an understanding of the self as autonomous and indivisible.
Though Liza did not return to Rome in the fall of 1874, she did not share Polenov’s disillusionment with Italy. Recalling his visit to Abramtsevo in September of 1873, she wrote: “Vasilii [Polenov] spoke enthusiastically about the North, about the Viatka River, about the Russian village and landscape, and cursed the South and Italy. We argued mightily and the more we defended Italy, the more he cursed it. He planned to go to Paris in the winter to work with Repin.” Ibid., l. 84. On the life and work of Il’ia Repin (1844–1930), see Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
In Haldey’s study of Mamontov, a mere few lines and footnotes are devoted to Liza, primarily to contrast her interest in neonationalism to Savva’s appetite for “modernism” and to explain Savva’s eventual abandonment of the Abramtsevo workshops to her. Haldey, Mamontov’s Private Opera, 299. Also, for example, see Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Valentin Serov: Port raits of Russia’s Silver Age (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 37–39;
Wendy R. Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21–27; and
Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922 (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1998), 11–13.
Ibid. Bruce Lincoln described Mamontova as a “quiet, pious, and plain … woman of indomitable spirit” who shared with her husband “an interest in art, music, literature, and the beauties of the Russian countryside,” adding that “a love for the people belonged especially to her.” W. Bruce Lincoln, Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Russian Art (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 232.
Valentina Bergman Serova (1849–1924), widow of the composer Aleksandr Serov (1820–71), completed the last act of her husband’s third opera, The Power of Evil (Vrazh’ia sila, 1871), with the help of Nikolai Solov’ev. Already an accomplished pianist, Serova then began composing operas of her own. The first, Uriel Acosta, premiered at the Bol’shoi Theater on April 15, 1885; her third opera, Il’ia Muromets, was staged at the Moscow Private Opera in 1899 with Shaliapin in the title role. The manuscripts of her second and fourth operas have been lost. For an account of Serova’s life and work, including her political views and activities, see Valentina Serova, Kak ros moi syn, ed. Il’ia S. Zil’bershtein (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1968), 15–50. See also Valkenier, Valentin Serov, 6–19.
While Russian scholars tend to place Mamontov in the realist or nationalist camp, the musicologist Olga Haldey links the Private Opera to modernist aesthetics and the operational principles of the Ballets Russes. What she sometimes understates is the complex composition and eclecticism of the “modernists,” as well as the undiminished importance and evolving understanding of the “realist” tradition in Russian early-twentieth-century theater arts. Olga Haldey, “Savva Mamontov, Serge Diaghilev, and the Rocky Path to Modernism,” The Journal of Musicology 22, 4 (2005): 566–67. Also see Haldey, Mamontov’s Private Opera, 35–129. I contend that Mamontov’s “realism”—his desire to present opera as drama—implicitly rested on a melodramatic conception of the real or authentic and was hostile to naturalism.
For account s of Mamontov ’s many talents and hobbies, see the biographical studies of Mark Kopshitser, Savva Mamontov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), and
Evgeny Arenzon, Savva Mamontov (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1995). Also see
Vera Rossikhina, Opernyi teatr S. Mamontova (Moscow: Muzyka, 1985), esp. 15–62.
Sergei Rachmaninov, the assistant conductor of the Private Opera during the 1897–98 season, called Mamontov a “born stage director.” Rachmaninov, Literaturnoe nasledie vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzyka, 1976), 55. On Mamontov’s personal and professional influence, see the reminiscences of soprano
Nadezhda Salina, Zhizn’ i stsena (Leningrad: Vserossiiskoe teatral’noe obshchestvo, 1941), 11–19, 56–78. Salina sang with Mamontov’s first company from 1885 to 1887 and at the Bol’shoi Theater from 1887 to 1908. Also see the memoir of the singer and renowned stage director
Vasilii Shkafer (1867–1937), Sorok let na stsene russkoi opery: vospominaniia, 1890–1930 (Leningrad: Teatr opery i baleta imeni S. M. Kirova, 1936). Trained by Mamontov, Shkafer left the Private Opera to become a stage director at the Bol’shoi Theater (1904–24) and ended his career as chief stage director and artistic director of the Leningrad State Opera and Ballet. For other accounts of Mamontov’s mentorship of singers, see
Fedor Shaliapin, Maska i dusha (Minsk: Sovremennyi literator, 1999); and his nephew Platon Mamontov’s reminiscences, preserved in RGALI f. 799, op. 2, d. 4.
In making this claim, I draw on film scholar Richard Dyer’s analysis of Hollywood stars. Dyer contends that film stars express ideas of person-hood “in large measure shoring up the notion of the individual but also at times registering the doubts and anxieties attendant on it.” The star, after all, is more than just an onscreen image. “A series of shots of a star whose image has changed … at various points in her career could work to fragment her, to present her as nothing but a series of disconnected looks; but in practice it works to confirm that beneath all these different looks there is a … core [namely, a flesh and blood person] that gives all those looks a unity.” Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 10.
Sergei I. Zimin, ed., Istoriia chastnoi opery v Rossii (1914), in RGALI f. 746 (personal fond of Sergei Ivanovich Zimin), op. 1, d. 213 (Mockup of an unpublished book about the history of private opera in Russia edited by Zimin, Sergei Ivanovich). Publication of the book likely was precluded by the outbreak of World War I.
Ibid. For an account of serf theaters and less than flattering portrayals of the nobles who ran them, see Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
Ibid. Kochetov, “Materialy dlia istorii chastnoi opery,” RGALI f. 746, op. 1, d. 213, l. 8; Pavel Tret’iakov (1832–98) amassed an impressive collection of Russian realist art and donated it the city of Moscow in 1892. Ivan Tsvetkov was on the governing board of the Tret’iakov Gallery after Pavel’s death. The textile magnate Koz’ma Soldatenkov (1829–89) was also a publisher of books on culture and science, as well as an active member of the Society of Lovers of Art, founded in 1860. Consisting of patrons and artists, the society attempted to bring art to the people through permanent exhibitions, art competitions, and raffles. Its membership included other prominent entre-preneurs and patrons like Pavel Tret’iakov and his brother Sergei, the Morozovs, and Dmitrii Botkin. Konstantin Alekseev-Stanislavskii, cofounder of the Moscow Art Theater, was born into one of the elite merchant families of Moscow. On the influence of Tret’iakov and other merchant-entrepreneur patrons on Russian art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see John O. Norman, “Pavel Tretiakov and Merchant Art Patronage, 1850–1900,” and John E. Bowlt, “The Moscow Art Market,” in Between Tsar and People, ed. Edith W. Clowes, et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 93–107 and 108–28; also see
Aleksandr N. Bokhanov, Kollektsionery i metsenaty v Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1989).
For more examples of the use of rutina in the theater discourse of the period, see Murray Frame, The St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters: Stage and State in Revolutionary Russia, 1900–1920 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2000), 45; and
E. Anthony Swift, Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 54.
RGALI f. 746, op. 1, d. 213, ll. 32–33. Rimskii-Korsakov’s The Noble- woman Vera Sheloga (1898) premiered at the Bol’shoi Theater as the prologue to his three-act opera Maid of Pskov on November 10, 1901. The dramatic soprano Mariia A. Deisha-Sionitskaia (1859–1932) sang at the Mariinskii Theater from 1883 to 1891 and then at the Bol’shoi Theater until 1908. She debuted at the Bol’shoi as Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and was associated with the dramatic roles of the Russian repertoire.
Shaliapin (1873–1938) was employed at the Mariinskii Theater when Mamontov invited him in the summer of 1896 to sing with the Moscow Private Opera in Nizhnii Novgorod during the All-Russian Trade, Industry, and Arts Fair. The young bass showed promise, and in the fall, when it was time for Shaliapin to return to St. Petersburg and begin rehearsals at the state theater, Mamontov asked him to join his company for its first season in Moscow. Shaliapin hesitated, unwilling to leave his lover, ballerina Iola Tornaghi, and reluctant to pay a forfeit to the Imperial Theater. Mamontov settled the matter quickly: he offered a three-year contract of 7,200 rubles a year (Shaliapin had been offered 300 rubles a month at the Mariinskii), agreed to pay half the forfeit of 7,200 to the Mariinskii, brought Tornaghi to Moscow, and promised Shaliapin attractive bass roles he was not given at the Imperial Theater — Susanin, Mephistopheles, and Ivan the Terrible. The Mariinskii contract was annulled and Shaliapin debuted at the Moscow Private Opera on September 22, 1896, in A Life for the Tsar. For Shaliapin’s account of his negotiations with Mamontov and the Mariinskii Theater, see Fedor Shaliapin and Maxim Gorky, Chaliapin: An Autobiography as Told by Maxim Gorky, ed. and trans. Nina Froud and James Hanley (New York: Stein and Day, 1967), 123–27.
Some historians have emphasized the increasing porousness of the legal estate structure, which by the late imperial period could not accommodate the new urban occupations, “middle-group” identities, and a rapidly growing consumer economy. For example, see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).
For example, see Michael Confino, “On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Russia,” Daedalus (Spring, 1972), 117–49;
Aleksander Gella, “A Structural Definition of the Intelligentsia against the Background of Three Historical Periods,” in The Mythmakers: Intellectuals and the Intelligentsia in Perspective, ed. Raj P. Mohan (New York: Praeger, 1987), 21–31;
Abbott Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
Martin Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” in The Russian Intelligentsia, ed. Richard Pipes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 1–18;
Vladimir C. Nahirny, The Russian Intelligentsia: From Torment to Silence (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1983); and more recently,
Susan K. Morrissey, Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
For example, Louise McReynolds refers to the bulk of the “cultural elite” as the intelligentsia, who “through successive generations” exercised cultural hegemony and “enjoyed status as a social category … entrance to [which] was based on political attitudes rather than economic or family status.” The intelligentsia was the principal source of high art and the essential referent for all criticism of capitalism and commercial culture in Russia: “Fetishizing Russia’s highbrow culture, the intelligentsia provided both a frame of political reference and a common stock of symbols that influenced subsequent generations … Its members came to dominate as the lead characters in a master narrative that has only recently begun to incorporate interpretations of culture that compete with theirs.” McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 7–8.
R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvenoi mysli, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1911), 3–24.
Dmitrii N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, Istoriia russkoi intelligentsii, 3 vols., in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg, 1909–11), v. In another work published in 1910, Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii insisted that “intelligentsia” was not coterminous with “intellectuals” or the “educated class.” Rather, it was a “thinking stratum specifically with a rationalist outlook and moral civic consciousness.” Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, “Psikhologiia russkoi intelligentsii,” in Intelligentsiia v Rossii/Vekhi: Sborniki statiei 1909–1910 (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1991), 382.
In Stage Fright, a study of the performing arts in late imperial Russia, Paul Du Quenoy argues that neither middle-class impresarios nor theater audiences were politically engaged at the turn of the twentieth century. But because Du Quenoy’s understanding of politics is confined to Duma participation, radical opinion, and overt revolutionary activity, his intervention misses an opportunity to describe and analyze the power struggles actually in evidence: the contests for institutional and discursive dominance among variously allied impresarios, entrepreneurs, newly minted music professionals, and journalists seeking to implement their vision of enlightenment and to define the nation. Du Quenoy also ignores the ways aesthetics informed revolutionary politics and does not acknowledge political culture as an important field of inquiry—behaviors, affective sensibilities, aesthetic practices, and symbols transmitted aurally, visually, and textually, whether its carriers knew it or not. Du Quenoy, Stage Fright: Politics and the Performing Arts in Late Imperial Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), esp. 1–15, 137–214, 243–65.
Mikhail. M. Ippolitov-Ivanov, “Vmesto predisloviia,” in Istoriia chastnoi opery v Rossii, ed. S. I. Zimin (1914), RGALI f. 746, op. 1, d. 213, ll. 2–3.
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© 2013 Anna Fishzon
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Fishzon, A. (2013). Entrepreneurs and the Public Mission of the Russian Private Opera. In: Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023452_2
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