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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.
Italian opera was brought to Russia in the 18 th century and Italian composers were also involved in the setting of Russian libretti. This may be seen as part of the westernising policies of Peter the Great, much as Kemal Ataturk in Turkey in the 20 th century saw the introduction of opera as a concomitant part of his programme of modernisation.
Russian Nationalism
A true Russian tradition of art- music was established in the 19 th century. This was started by Glinka with the supposedly historical opera A Life for the Tsar , followed by Ruslan and Lyudmila , based on Pushkin and exploring more exotic, oriental elements, as Russian composers were to continue to do. Three, at least, of the five nationalist composers who made up what became known as the Mighty Handful, made notable contributions to Russian opera. Mussorgsky achieved this, in particular, in his historical Boris Godunov and Borodin in his exotic Prince Igor . Rimsky- Korsakov may be better known abroad for his orchestral works, but he also wrote a series of important operas, ending with the exoticism of The Golden Cockerel , which, after trouble with the censors, was only staged after his death. Tchaikovsky, not one of the five, but thoroughly Russian in his music, is known in international repertoire for two operas based on Pushkin, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades.
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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