Conference Agenda

In the late 1860s, Prague’s Provisional Theater produced three operas by non-Czech Slavic composers. The first of these pan-Slavic productions was Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar in 1866. This was the first production of a Glinka opera outside of Russia, and it excited the composer’s Russian followers so much that they also sent Mily Balakirev to prepare a Prague performance of Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila in 1867. In 1868, the Provisional Theater’s music director Bedřich Smetana also produced Halka by Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko. The three productions, however, initiated political controversies that illustrate the complexities of nineteenth-century pan-Slavism.

This paper focuses on the Czech reception of A Life for the Tsar and shows that it was driven by the conflicted attitudes of Czech political and cultural elites to Russian imperialism. The group that pushed for the performance of A Life for the Tsar and later closely collaborated with Balakirev viewed tsarist Russia uncritically as a powerful, brotherly ally that could help the Czechs achieve greater autonomy within the Habsburg Empire. This group also criticized the 1863 Polish uprising against Russia as undermining Slavic unity. Another Czech group, which included Smetana, supported the Polish rebels, considered Russian imperialist policies a threat, and viewed the political message of A Life for the Tsar as troubling. The Smetana circle also pushed for the production of Halka. The Czech Halka, however, incited further controversy when Polish commentators complained that the attendance of the opera was low because the Czechs preferred Glinka’s works. Balakirev, by contrast, was upset by Czech criticism of A Life for the Tsar and by what he thought was an inadequate appreciation of Ruslan. Austrian imperial authorities, furthermore, felt threatened by the Czech Russophiles and banned performances of A Life for the Tsar that used the original Russian text, allowing only those with a Czech translation. The Glinka affair, therefore, shows that in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, opera was a powerful tool not merely of national representation but also of foreign policy relations, and that the cultural propaganda of Russian political doctrines was as controversial then as it is now.

Prior to its censorship in 1936, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1932) was staged by opera companies across the Soviet Union, Europe, North America, and Scandinavia. Yet, despite a strong Communist presence in 1930s France, and the Communist daily L’Humanité providing updates of the opera’s success abroad, Lady Macbeth would not be heard at the Opéra de Paris until 1992. Outside of the capital, however, the opera followed a different trajectory: a production of the modified version, Katerina Ismaïlova, premiered at the Opéra de Nice on the Côte d’Azur in 1964, while the original Lady Macbeth was first performed in France in 1989 by the Opéra de Nancy et de Lorraine, which revived its production two years later for performances in Toulouse.

This paper discusses productions of Lady Macbeth in twentieth-century France, with a focus on those staged before the work’s Parisian premiere in 1992. By analyzing the local dynamics that led each region to program and perform Soviet opera, I suggest that these efforts from smaller companies should not only be considered remarkable given the historical dominance of Paris in France’s artistic landscape, but that they also reflect the political movement towards decentralization that began to gain traction in France from the 1960s.

As the programming of France’s regional opera houses in the twentieth century has been little studied in comparison to those of the capital in the same period, this paper extends the work of scholars such as Nigel Simeone, as well as parallel work in dance history, where Stéphanie Gonçalves has examined Soviet ballet in Paris at mid-century. Given its regional focus, the paper also builds on Katharine Ellis’s work on musical life in the French provinces in the century before World War II, and thus respond to Ellis’s recent call for music historians to ‘decenter the capital’ in studies of French musical life and culture. Taken together, these case studies of opera houses and tours in Nice, Nancy, Toulouse, and—after the Parisian premiere—in Marseille, Nantes, and Dijon offer a fresh perspective on Soviet music and its complex history outside of the USSR.

When Ernst Krenek’s opera Orpheus und Eurydike premiered at the Kassel Staatstheater in November 1926, critics saw it as a sign of the future of German opera. This expressionist adaptation of the Orpheus myth, however, was not an obvious choice for operatic reform given the supposed crisis of expressionism in Germany. More surprising still was that Kassel was the site of such a defining moment in opera history. Eighteenth-century works had dominated the Staatstheater’s most recent seasons, and when it did have the chance to premiere something modern, like Krenek’s Second Symphony, the orchestra had struggled with the work’s modernist idiom. While scholars have continually emphasised Berlin as Weimar Germany’s self-conscious modernist centre, critics from across Germany at Orpheus und Eurydike’s premiere grappled with how a peripheral place such as Kassel was now the potential birthplace of an operatic reform. As Kassel’s theatre intendant Paul Bekker remarked, all eyes that night were on Kassel, which was suddenly at that moment thrust to the forefront of debates around the future of opera.

In this paper I examine how critics at Orpheus und Eurydike’s premiere were acutely aware of Kassel’s peripheral status as a modern opera hub. In drawing on Christopher Chowrimootoo’s (2016) work on ‘minor’ composers and expanding it to encompass major/minor, or rather central/peripheral, spaces, I argue that these labels greatly informed the reception, performance history and subsequent scholarship of Orpheus und Eurydike. While contemporary critics lauded Kassel’s successful presentation of a modern work, the city’s peripheral reputation has meant that the opera has appeared only rarely in histories of German theatre. Nonetheless, these labels, which were far more fluid than we might expect, did not prevent supposedly peripheral places from becoming caught up in wider conversations about modern opera in newspapers and journals with national readerships. As I demonstrate through the case of Orpheus und Eurydike’s premiere, understandings of central/peripheral musical spaces can tell us a great deal about the way place was used as a powerful tool in constructing contemporary discourses surrounding both opera and modernism generally in Weimar Germany.