Conference Agenda

Over the past three decades, scholars have made significant strides in deepening our understanding of opera in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century. Some have explored Russian operatic works through hermeneutic lenses, expanded the repertoire studied to include imported operas, and integrated concepts like “official nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism” into their analyses. Others have examined the cultural policies shaping Russia’s operatic landscape, made important archival discoveries about domestic and foreign opera troupes in Russia, and analyzed the roles of key figures (such as the tsar) and institutions (including theater censorship) in facilitating opera production. Despite these advancements, one critical dimension of Russia’s operatic culture remains underexplored: the audience experience. This paper addresses that gap by investigating the opera audiences of St. Petersburg between 1825 and 1840—a transformative period in Russia’s operatic history.
Specifically, I examine the opera-goers’ social composition, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, and aesthetic preferences (the last manifested in their repertorial choices and patronage of particular troupes—Italian, German, or Russian). In addition, I detail how these audiences interacted with one another, navigated opera theater spaces, and adhered to various forms of etiquette associated with each venue and troupe. Beyond reconstructing the demographic profile and behaviors of opera audiences, and defining the environment in which they engaged with opera, I consider the significance that opera held for these listeners. I seek to uncover the dramatic, musical, and ideological expectations that they brought to their encounters with the genre. To tell this multidimensional story, I draw on a wide range of primary sources, including contemporaneous opera criticism, letters, memoirs, and, most importantly, government documents—fee schedules, subscription lists, secret police reports on audience behavior, and the Theaters Directorate’s detailed records of nightly happenings in the theaters. By aligning its novel social and cultural insights with recent research on opera policy, this paper offers a fresh perspective on the operatic culture of St. Petersburg in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

There have been three Rachmaninoffs from the beginning: “composer, pianist, conductor,” as the title of Barrie Martyn’s classic 1990 biography conveniently states. Rachmaninoff’s trifurcated identity complicated his reception both in life and in death, when it was all too easy to observe that, while he had stood at the forefront of contemporary pianism, he was anything but a modern composer (Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed. [1954]). This tendency to appraise his legacy with reference to modernity has evaporated in recent decades along with the modernistic ethos that elicited it, allowing scholars to consider instead his nuanced stylistic relation to his contemporaries in cultural context (Johnston 2009; Mitchell 2016). General histories of Western music have yet to capture this nuance, however (Taruskin 2009; Burkholder 2019). With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible now to see three other Rachmaninoffs: the late-Romantic, yes, but also the Symbolist and the post-Romantic.

Three piano pieces produced at equal intervals across forty-eight years succinctly illustrate Rachmaninoff’s triple stylistic identity. The Prelude in C-sharp Minor, composed in 1892, represents the late-Romantic, offering up to the fin de siècle salon an evocative mix of rich chromaticism, virtuosic textures, and colorful harmonies. Composed in 1916, the Étude-Tableau in C Minor, op. 39, no. 7, by contrast, employs post-tonal harmony to evoke the soundscape of Scriabin-esque Symbolism in the twilight of the Russian Empire. Finally, the Humoresque in G Major, composed in 1893 but tellingly revised in 1940, refracts Rachmaninoff’s native Romanticism through the prism of sassy interwar Neoclassicism, placing post-tonal harmony at the service of mockery—with a tinge of jazz. Together, these and other works show that, while Rachmaninoff was certainly far from the front line of aesthetic experimentation in his day, he nonetheless maintained contact with contemporary trends.

Flicking through the pages of a guitar-song manuscript copied in seventeenth-century Avignon, filled with hundreds of songs in European languages, the reader encounters a song titled “Chanson Turque.” The song’s text is copied phonetically by a French speaker and the accompanying chords are in alfabeto, an Italian notation-system for the 5-course guitar. They leave a very partial trace of what this song might have sounded like. Yet, the song’s presence in a woman’s guitar songbook compiled within a papal enclave in the south of France, is highly significant.

Musicologists have recently demonstrated the important role of travelers, diplomatic envois, and plurilingual port cities in Franco-Ottoman musical contacts and exchanges. This paper contributes to this growing body of scholarship aiming to include France within histories of the Mediterranean and to acknowledge plurilingualism as an intrinsic part of Early Modern musical experiences. The “Chanson Turque” of the newly discovered Avignon manuscript, I argue, suggests that Ottoman songs resounded beyond coastal and Parisian spaces, travelling further inland to other cities and reaching private domestic musical practices.

To demonstrate this, I will discuss possible ways in which a Turkish song could have reached Avignon and in what contexts it was performed. I propose a translation and transcription of the “Chanson Turque,” emphasizing its hybrid nature as well as its relation to other surviving Turkish songs in France. I ask what it means for an elite French woman to sing a “Chanson Turque” alongside courtly European repertoires but also explicitly erotic songs in the Occitan local language. What does this say about transnational mobility, the permeability between public and private spaces, and personal song choices? The use of the 5-course guitar is noteworthy, as the instrument often served as vehicle of transnational European repertoires, as “translator” of foreign music to Europeans, and as marker of otherness in France.

The “Chanson Turque” is only a partial trace of lost sounds and voices, both French and Ottoman, but it opens a window into a connected and plurilingual world, uncovering new spaces and contexts in which Turkish songs were sung and heard in Early Modern France.