| Summary: | This thesis analyses the formal qualities of the nineteenth-century Russian opera libretto and its status as neither a literary nor musical object in order to consider broader questions that can help rethink how to write the history of Russian opera. Such questions include the nature of operatic authorship, collaborative partnerships during the creation of the libretto, the use of Western European models and forms in Russian opera, and the use of anthropological or folkloric sources. I use four specific case studies drawn from across the century, allowing the development of these broader questions to be traced over roughly ninety years of Russian cultural history. Building on existing interdisciplinary scholarship on Russian opera, this thesis seeks to argue that scholars need to look beyond a prevalent ‘page-to-stage’ model of operatic adaptation and explore instead a more multifocal and collaborative approach to the history of Russian opera and its relationship to literature.
In the Introduction I outline my aims and methodology, while also providing an account of the interdisciplinarity of the subject and a brief history of the institution of Russian opera in the nineteenth century. In Chapter One I discuss Ivan Susanin (1815) by Aleksandr Shakhovskoy and Catterino Cavos, examining the prevalence of a particularly eighteenth-century model of operatic adaptation and nationalist sensibility in the decades before the rise of Romanticism. Chapter Two explores the institutional barriers against the development of new Russian opera and the continued influence of European formal models through an analysis of Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka (1856). Chapter Three explores Tchaikovsky’s Charodeika (1887), adaptation as a composer’s personal reading of a literary text, and the influence of prominent singers on operatic development. Chapter Four positions Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko (1895) as a collaboratively produced work of operatic ethnography, tracing a history of folklore-inflected opera. Throughout, I position each as members of a ‘problematic’ tradition of Russian opera as opposed to the canonical page-to-stage paradigm, discussing how each pushes against a particular assumption about the genre.
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