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From the very beginning opera brought together all the arts. It involved painting, poetry, drama, dance and music, making it the most complex of art forms.
Development of Russian opera and ballets was connected with the Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow and the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Peterburg. In 1806 D. Stolypin, a landlord, owner of private theatre, decided to sell his actors and actresses. They wrote a petition to the Emperor and asked him to ransom and leave them in Moscow theatre. Tsar Alexander I paid for them 32.000 rubles, a significant sum of money at that time. This was the way to organize a troupe of a theater in the beginning of the 18th century. Since that moment the courtier theatre in Moscow received the title of "Royal/Emprial". This meant that repetoir of the theatre was formed up the Emperor's family and depended upon tastes of the Emprial court.
Since 1840s history of the Bolshoy Theatre was closely related with the development of Russian classical operatic and ballet music. First performance of a national heroic and tragic opera "Life for the Tsar" in 1842 and of opera "Ruslan And Lyudmila" in 1846, both composed by Mikhail Glinka, took place at the Bolshoy Theatre. Later all the operas listed above were performed on the scene of the Bolshoy or Mariinsky Theatre. All of them were composed on librettos based on works by Alexander Pushkin or other Russian writers and covered different events of the Russian nationalistic history.
The 20th century was the beginning of a new noontide of Russian opera and theatrical-decorative art.
The mighty Handful
The FIVE, or the Mighty Five, is the label given to a group of Russian composers that formed during the 1860s. Supported by the influential critic Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906), the Five - Mily Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, Cesar Cui, Modest Musorgski, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov -- sought to legitimize the goals and achievements of nationalistic music and to oppose the dominance of Western musical influences. Although linked by common propagandistic aims and by the characteristic absence of formal musical education, the composers wrote in differing styles. The most lasting musical achievements were made by Borodin, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Borodin is noted for his use of Russian orientalisms in works such as In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880) and his opera Prince Igor. In his numerous operas on historical and fairy-tale subjects, as well as in the well-known symphonic suite Scheherazade (1891), Rimsky-Korsakov exploited the unusual modal tendencies of Russian folk music, and his orchestration was colorful and effective.
Musorgsky was undoubtedly the most original composer of the Five. Continuing Dargomyzhsky's search for musical realism, he combined an instinctive flair for the nuances of folk music with flexible, textually motivated rhythmic practices and unusual harmonic juxtapositions in his many songs, his operatic masterpiece Boris Godunov (1869-72), and his suite for piano Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). Although he was misunderstood by many of his contemporaries, Mussorgsky's legacy has been profoundly important for music in the 20th century.
Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Stravinsky
Russian opera continued in the 20 th century, particularly in the work of Shostakovich, whose A Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District won official condemnation. Its subject might have seemed quite acceptable to a Communist regime that believed in the social and political purpose of the arts. The opera is based on a story by Nikolay Leskov in which a young wife murders her father- in- law, and, with the help of her lover, her husband, crimes for which she and her lover are punished. This certainly follows political teaching in showing the degeneracy of the capitalists at the heart of the drama. For Stalin, however, the score was chaos instead of music.
Prokofiev left Russia in 1917 and spent a number of years abroad, before finally returning home in 1936, in time for the official attack on Shostakovich. For Chicago he had written the opera The Love for Three Oranges , but the next opera, The Fiery Angel , was not performed until after the composer's death in 1953. His most ambitious opera in Russia was the monumental War and Peace , based on Tolstoy. This was completed in 1948 but not staged until 1960.
Stravinsky, in exile from Russia, contributed to the genre in very Russian style in his earlier period, but his later opera The Rake's Progress , however characteristic in musical language, belongs rather to English and American repertoire in subject and language. With a plot based on Hogarth's series of engravings, the work is neo- classical in form and texture, combining the Rake's progress to disaster with the legend of Faust.
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